With the high-altitude resorts already a month away from opening their ski areas, the first figures for mountain holiday bookings are in.
And that's a pretty good sign for our resorts! With just a month to go before the first pistes open in Savoie (Tignes and Val Thorens open on 25 November), the first bookings have been made.
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With a slight lead of 0.7% over the same period last year, winter sports fans are already turning out in force. All this despite an expected slight rise in the price of ski passes, of the order of an additional 6 to 7%.
In the past, French and foreign skiers were used to hitting the slopes for the first time this year during the All Saints' holiday. on the glaciers of Tignes and les 2 AlpesThis will not be the case again this year.
Resorts at altitudes of over 1850 m are all the rage
The fault lies with the temperatures, which are not providing optimum snow conditions. To date, the major ski areas at altitudes of over 1850 metres have recorded +4% in additional bookings, all periods combined.
The other stations, on the other hand, were down by 3.5%, according to data from the G2A institute, which supplies data to theNational Observatory of Mountain Resorts (OSM).
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Although the calendar is favourable this year, with Christmas and New Year falling on a Monday, the 'high' week of 17 February, considered the most profitable, has come to a halt, due to a rise in prices. More affordable, the April period is also on the back foot.
And yet.., as former ski champion Julien Lizeroux told us in an interview, "Last spring, we had exceptional conditions with real winter snow. And there was nobody on the slopes! We need to make people aware that the ski season doesn't end in March.