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Due to the credit crunch skiing occupancies went down last skiing season.

This is despite of acceptable early on reservations coupled with brilliant snow fall.

This reduction in snowboarders follows 5 years of development in the ski industry, and the numbers came down from 1.2 million in 2008 to 850000 last winter.

Perhaps due to skiers giving their annual ski holidays a miss, while other snowboarders who’d generally have two or more snowboarding vacations, just had the one.

A fall of 15% was felt by the independent travel sector and a few cheap airlines reducing the number of airplanes to some destinations.

Some tour operators witnessed their sales reducing by around 15%.

Nonetheless, the top companies market share continued at 72% and the Alps in France carried on as the most visited destination with about 37% of ski holidays.

This meant that a lot of tour operators slashed the total number of luxury chalets they rent this year.

Catered chalets especially will witness a reduction in no.s because a luxury catered chalet costs more in terms of hosts and chefs and lease if it is unoccupied.

It’s unlikely therefore that we will benefit from the last minute deals which were up for grabs last season.

Although prices are in all likelihood to augment, costs probably won’t increase a lot.

The next season undoubtedly poses real challenges for the ski industry that is influenced by the consequences of the recession, weakness of the pound against the euro, higher costs of fuel and large fixed operating costs for ski businesses.