Artificial Snowmaking: Winter Sports Between State-Owned Company Policy and Tourist Demand

Abstract

Due to changing climatic conditions, artificial snowmaking has become a major method of ski resort adaptation globally. It is a financially intensive operation requiring high start-up investment and involving operating costs that are dependent on weather conditions. Operational costs and the expansion of artificial snowmaking systems increase the price of ski passes. In our work, we analyzed the operations of a public company that operates the largest ski resorts in Serbia and directs the flow of winter sports tourism. We tried to determine, by means of correlation, the extent to which ski pass prices in the biggest winter resort in Serbia are influenced by factors such as natural snow cover, number of tourist overnights, ski run length, and local wages. The results of the survey indicate an increasing transformation of the ski resort into a thematic attraction independent of climatic factors in terms of determining ski pass prices.

Balancing Act: Assessing the Impacts of Winter Tourism on Natural Heritage in Kopaonik National Park and Charting a Sustainable Path Forward

“…Challenges arise with wastewater discharge, partly controlled and partly spontaneous, leading to environmental degradation. Regarding our study area, several studies confirm the negative impact of intensive winter tourism development on water quality, especially in terms of the physico-chemical composition of water and the condition of watercourses [72,126], as well as water consumption [127].…”

A New Paradigm of a Sustainability-Balanced Scorecard Model for Sport Tourism

“…To increase the number of tourists, related transportation, such as domestic and international air transport [35], as well as investment in infrastructure for artificial snow, also plays an important role [36].…”

Topic Modelling for Ski Resorts: An Analysis of Experience Attributes and Seasonality

“…First, many studies have investigated the topic of ski resorts from economics, finance, and business perspectives. Various sets of factors were introduced into the ski resorts' performances, profits, and pricing, and demands prediction problems, such as resorts' facilities [6,34], snow conditions [9,[34][35][36][37][38], slope conditions [6,9,34], altitudes [6], prices [37][38][39][40][41][42], weather [8,10,20,22,35,40,41,43,44], policy strategies [4,21], original country GDP [2,36,38], time period or season [10,36,43,45], consumer income [10,40], local economy [9], distance or location [6,46], transportation or related costs [10,34], and other consumer characteristics [8,9,47].…”

“…Prior studies have shown that the demand, performance, and development of ski resorts are influenced by multi-aspect factors, such as service quality, time, transportation, local development, natural resources, climate, economy, and skiers' characteristics [2,[6][7][8][9][10], which revealed the complicated nature of the ski resort industry. However, in terms of the skiers' experiences perspective, most studies have only focused on single-aspect factors, such as service quality attributes or subjective experience [11][12][13].…”