Partly due to the depression skiing sales dropped last season.

In spite of very good early holiday sales coupled with brilliant skiing.

This drop in snowboarders follows six winters of successive development within the snowboarding industry, and the number of vacationers reduced from 1.05 million two seasons ago to under a million last ski season.

This is partly due to snowboarders giving their annual snowboarding trip a miss, and additional skiers who’d ordinarily take two snowboarding breaks, merely took the one.

Sales for the independent travel sector fell by 15% with several low cost airlines cutting the no. of routes to several cities.

Moreover tour operators saw the sales falling by 15%.

Even so, the top companies share of the market stayed at just over 70% with ski chalets France remaining the most popular destination with nearly 40% of the English ski market.

Due to this many tour operators reduced the no. of catered chalets they lease this year.

The catered chalet markets in particular are going to see a a drop in holiday makers in light of the fact that a luxury catered chalet incurs more costs in terms of chefs and hosts and lease when it is empty.

It is unlikely therefore we will see the type of special offers that were up for grabs last year.

Costs are in all likelihood to rise, costs probably won’t increase considerably.

This winter undoubtedly poses real challenges for an industry which is impacted by the outcomes of the global recession, exchange rate, soaring costs of fuel on top of high fixed operating costs for snowboarding businesses.

Next year skiers will be more and more cost sensitive, which shall contribute to a reversion of the last years which saw a development in the skiing industry.

[Large-scale ski tour operators might well claw back the ground lost to the independent ski sector if they employ their buying power to negotiate better costs and pass this to clients as tempting package deals.

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