The ski brochures are coming
Thursday September 2, 2010 - Email this article to a friend

To many people today they are an expensive waste and come at an environmental cost. 

Expect to see quite a few soon as the end of the summer holidays traditionally marks the time when people's thoughts turn to winter and skiing holidays.

Though this year it has happened even earlier.

Crystal was first out of the blocks and here at PlanetSKI we seem to remember getting one several weeks ago, though it is still in its celephane wrapper.

It is sitting in a pile along with ones from Thomson, Erna Low, Flexiski, Snowbizz and a few others.

The pile is already fairly heavy to pick up.

It made us wonder why the printed brochure is still necessary.

Still apparently popular"Our research shows that the customers still want them, the travel agents still want them and people within the industry still want them," says the managing director of Crystal, Mathew Prior.

"They are expensive and we would very much like to reduce the amount we print, but we believe they are still needed."

Crystal is the UK's largest travel operator and it orders up 500,000 brochures per year.  They cost 70p each to produce and then there is the postage and packing too.

Those prices eventually find their way through to the cost of a ski holiday.

However the print run for Crystal has already been substantially reduced. 10 years ago it produced 1 million brochures.

"We try to put as much on line as we can and the brochure is smaller and more targeted as we wish to do as much as we can to reduce the environment cost," says Marion Telsnig, who has responsibility for environmental policies at Crystal.

The current one is 403 pages long.

"It may seem a bit old fashioned to use a brochure but I find it easier to leaf through a brochure than fiddle around on-line and quite frankly I spend far too much time on the internet already and it is quite nice to leaf at leisure through a brochure," said one PlanetSKI reader we asked.

One new ski operator, Zenith Holidays, only offers its product on line and deliberately chose not  to have a brochure when it launched last winter.

The company goes to 23 different ski resorts across five countries.

"We find people prefer to select thier holiday on a web site and of course we save money by not having to print and distribute a brochure and we can pass that saving on to our customers," said Katie Waddington from Zenith Holidays.

"We also establish a direct relationship with the vast majority of out clients by telephone contact too and it so works very well for us."

So which do you prefer; brochure or web site? Do let us know in the comment box below.

In a related story, we have just written about how the US magazine, Skiing, is only producing 2 printed issues next season.

10 other issues will appear on line only and readers will need to pay a subscription to see them.

It may be a fascinating glimpse of the future.

Will it be the only way to do it one day?We will be looking through both the brochures and the web sites of the UK Tour operators over the coming weeks to see what is on offer, as our thoughts turn to the coming season, so do check back for that.

In the meantime here are a few snippets:

-  Thomson has added three new resorts to its Ski & Snowboarding 2010/11 programme.  Schladming in Austria, host for the 2013 World Ski Championships and, in Italy, Pragelato, part of the Milky Way ski area linked via Sestriere, and Folgarida which has easy access to the ski area of Madonna di Campiglio.

-  Crystal has extended its Crystal Ski + programme that offers good value and all-inclusive holidays in 38 resorts this winter. Last year it did it in just 8 so it is seems to us at PlanetSKI a pretty good product.

-  Flexiski has introduced specialist vegetarian food at a hotlel in Courchevel 1850

-  Erna Low is making a concerted effort to encourage people to drive to the Alps and citing volcanic ash clouds, the tedium of airports and industrial action as reasons for doing so.

Erna Low though did though tell us all about the benefits of driving in an email it sent us, and its brochure is substantially smaller than it used to be.

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