The Beijing Winter Olympic Games ignited the enthusiasm of winter ice and snow sports, and the related retail consumption and vacation experience continued to heat up. Which domestic ski resort has the most natural endowment and sustainable development potential? Savills released a special report on resilient ice and snow, which gives you insight into the prospects and opportunities of China’s ice and snow sports and skiing vacation.
Sports brand stores are expanding actively, while ice and snow sports brands have successively settled in shopping centers in recent years, but the number of existing stores is still very small.
Consumers’ enthusiasm for sports brands has appeared since before the epidemic. Under the background of continuous growth of industry sales, sports brands also maintain a better expansion speed than the big market. Among the 20 major first and second tier cities in China, the expansion rate of mature sports brands reached 8.0% in 2021, with a year-on-year increase of 1.8 percentage points, which is higher than 2.6% of popular clothing brands.
As more and more ski and diving related brands are added, consumers begin to pay more attention to outdoor sports and diving. Many brands that previously appeared in the Chinese market through buyer’s stores or collection stores have significantly accelerated the speed of opening stores in the past two years, and have successively settled in shopping centers and opened independent physical stores.
In the field of skiing, ski suits, assault jackets, nautical jackets and other related products pay more attention to the combination of functionality and fashion. The average price of goods is several times higher than that of general sports brands and most outdoor brands, focusing on medium and high-end consumers. Compared with other sports and outdoor brands, ski brands are still limited to a few specialty stores in large cities and temporary stores in popular ski resorts, paying attention to the transmission of brand image.
Natural resources determine the resilience of ski resorts. Changbai Mountain, Jiangjunshan mountain and Yabuli area have the leading resilience index of holiday snow resorts.
Natural resources are the core competitiveness of ski resorts. In addition to four to five months of snow season operation every year, ski resorts are mostly used as ordinary outdoor venues in the rest of the year. However, limited by the layout of large-scale ski equipment and geographical conditions, the characteristic competitiveness of non snow season ski resort operation is greatly reduced compared with other types of tourism destinations. Facing the challenges, operators should not only continuously improve the competitiveness of snow season operation, but also vigorously invest in the construction of other entertainment facilities in order to achieve full season operation. In the long run, realizing sustainable development and embracing the concept of environmental protection may become a new field of snow field competition in the future.
Savills observed the resilience index of domestic famous ski resorts through four groups of indicators, including the duration of ski season, altitude, average snowfall and snowfall days in recent five years. In this way, 22 ski resorts with towed aerial ropeways in China are ranked.
The four groups of indicators not only have better values, but also show obvious advantages for ski resorts in Northeast China. Jilin Changbai Mountain has superior snow season conditions and low average temperature in winter. Among the 22 snow fields, the number of snowfall days is the largest. Other indicators also rank first, making Wanda Changbai Mountain and Luneng Changbai Mountain the two snow fields with the highest scores. However, compared with other Northeast regions, Changchun’s resilience index is relatively weak due to its low altitude and natural snowfall.
With the highest altitude and the highest average annual snowfall in recent five years, Jiangjunshan ski resort in Altay, Xinjiang ranks third. Similarly, KEKETUOHAI, which has an altitude advantage in Xinjiang, has the longest skiing season among the 22 ski resorts. Although it does not have an advantage in the index of natural snowfall, it ranks sixth on the whole.
The six snow fields in North China are all located in Chongli, Hebei Province, so the index scores of snowfall volume and snowfall days are the same. Among them, Chongli Wanlong ski season lasts longer and ranks higher, ranking 11th among the 22 ski resorts.