In part due to the down turn skiing holiday sales lowered last winter.

This is even with strong pre season holiday bookings and excellent skiing conditions.

These falls in no.s comes after 6 seasons of successive growth in the snowboarding industry, and the numbers went down from 1.1 million in 2008 to 850000 last winter.

This is partly due to snowboarders giving their annual ski vacation a miss, whilst other vacationers who’d typically take 2 ski vacations, just had one.

A fall of 15% was felt by the independent travel sector and several budget airlines cutting the amount of flights to several cities.

Moreover tour operators saw their reservations going down by 15%.

Nonetheless, the top tour operators share of the market stayed at a healthy 73% and the Alps in France remained the most visited holiday destination with nearly 40% of the English ski market.

Because of this several large ski operators cut the number of luxury ski chalets they lease this coming winter.

The catered chalet markets will surely witness a fall in holiday makers in light of the fact that a catered ski chalet costs more with regards to chefs and rent if it is not occupied.

It remains unlikely we shall witness the last minute deals that were around this season.

Whilst costs are likely to rise, prices probably won’t rise substantially.

Next season without doubt presents real problems for the snowboarding industry that is influenced by the events of the global recession, exchange rate, increased costs of fuel on top of large fixed costs for snowboarding businesses.

This season holidaymakers will become more cost sensitive, this will contribute to an about face of the last years which saw a development in the skiing industry.

[Large-scale ski operators could possibly retrieve the customers lost to the independent ski sector if they employ their buying-power to wrangle lower costs and pass these savings onto guests as inviting packages.