Ski resorts, like many other activities and sectors, are not alien to the emergency situation due to extreme drought. They are also suffering their own particular ordeal. Although, in the snow business, the bill you pay for the lack of precipitation is larger or smaller depending on how much snow you get. While some resorts are having a hard time, with losses of skiers, others have reached the middle of the season with very satisfactory figures, so much so that they are even aiming for new records at the end of the campaign.
The explanation? There is transfer of skiers. "This is normal when there is a desire to ski, it is a customer who does not hesitate to change destinations to go to the resort that offers him the best conditions", says Joaquim Alsina, director of the Catalan Association of Mountain Stations (ACEM). So, the paradox is written in stations like Baqueira-Beret, which is registering one of the best seasons in an extremely dry winter. But this reality is considered from the snow sector - given the conditions presented by the Catalan resort for skiing compared to other resorts - as "something very logical and normal". This complex is receiving clients from other resorts with less snow this winter.
This trend (at the beginning of the campaign with very little snow and in which they could not open their doors, for example, the Aragonese resorts of Grupo Aramón) was already confirmed during the Christmas holidays. Xavier Ubeira, the station's commercial director, reported already after Twelfth Day that the complex had received "12% more visitors than last year at this same time".
This does not mean, it must be clarified, that in a season as dry and exceptional as this, the number of skiers will increase globally. Customers who gain complexes like Aranès - with more than a hundred kilometers of open slopes - lose the resorts that have only been able to open, at this point in the season, half or less of their ski areas. They are the majority of the Catalan and Aragonese Pyrenees. Only Andorra and especially Pas de la Casa – a resort with an Atlantic climate like Baqueira-Beret – is cheating the season with better numbers than expected at the start of the campaign.
This transfer of skiers between resorts is not new. In fact, the last bridges of the Constitution have increased the "flight" of fans who make their reservations well in advance to resorts in the Alps, because they believe that there is now more guaranteed snow at earlier dates. This premise is not always fulfilled. And Baqueira, for example, has also suffered some season "flights" of customers to stations as close as Boí-Taüll, when there is more snow in the mountains of Alta Ribagorça than in the Aranese.
Although, as highlighted in the industry, it is not all about climate. "Investments in snow production systems are paying off, especially in winters as dry as this one", points out Joaquim Alsina. And also the work of the teams "who take care of the little snow they have as if it were a treasure so as not to lose or waste a flake", is emphasized by the sector. They know a lot about this in Baqueira, a resort that has not hesitated, for example, to move the snow between sectors to remove it from where it is left over and take it where it is missing. "Fifteen machines work, in two shifts, from five in the afternoon until nine in the morning", repeats Ubeira.
The result? "The skier now finds himself, even if there is little snow, with slopes in perfect conditions for practicing the activity", adds Alsina. This is precisely what has allowed the entire skiing sector to save this Christmas, with a satisfactory turnout on a global scale due to this complicated situation.
This can only be verified by those who visit the resorts, since with all the information that is being transmitted about the extreme drought and the news about the measures for the exceptional emergency, many ski fans think that this year before planning a trip to the snow. "There is a widespread paranoia outside the Pyrenees, with the message that it is impossible to ski in such a dry winter", confirms Xavi Ubieira.
And this is reducing the influx of skiers in all seasons. "The surprise of this most incredulous customer is huge when he arrives at the station and checks, in the case of Baqueira-Beret, that we have more than a hundred kilometers of track open", concludes Xavi Ubeira.
