Canada down too
Thursday July 9, 2009 - Email this article to a friend

The season before was a record year with 20.5m visitors in Canada so the fall to 18.4% has not come as a shock and is still the 7th best in the past 15 years.

Some resorts in eastern Canada even saw a rise by as much as 10% as they targeted locals rather international skiers and snowboarders.

Nevertheless it is still a significant fall and the blame is partially attached to poor snow, but mainly the global recession.

The whole of the North American ski industry has been hit hard by the recession and may not recover for at least 2 seasons according to the Chief Executive of Intrawest, Bill Jenson, the company that runs Whistler.

Lucky to be thereThe has told an industry conference that the recovery will not be V-shaped and that signs of recovery will not happen until 2010/11.

"People just don't want to open their wallet. What we offer isn't something people are required to have. It's optional," he said.

He even went as far as saying that Whistler may not have built the Peak 2 Peak gondola if it had know what would happen to the economy.

In the USA visits fell to 57.1 million last winter from a record 60.5 million in the 2007/08 season.

Parts of the Canadian ski industry are banking on the Winter Olympics held in Vancouver next year as giving them a boost, but the Winter Olympics does not always bring in extra business, in fact some people think quite the opposite.

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