Brief analysis 24: Tackle long-term challenges in winter tourism now!
Mag. Dr. Wolfgang Schwarzbauer
Chief Financial Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer, Head of Regional Economic Policy and Foreign Trade Research
According to Statistics Austria's national tourism satellite account, tourism contributed around 29.4 billion euros to Austria's value added in 2018 and 2019. Specifically, the contribution amounted to 7.5% of total value added. Between 2007 and 2019, revenue in the summer season accounted for an average of just 74% of revenue in the winter season, which underlines the importance of the winter season for Austrian tourism in particular.
Figure 1: Income from tourism according to the travel trade balance, 2007 - 2021.
Climate change poses an ever-increasing challenge in this context. Its effects are leading to a decline in snow cover, making it increasingly difficult to operate traditional winter tourism in the future. Data from Statistics Austria illustrates in which Austrian municipalities the number of snow days is most likely to decrease in 2050 compared to the year 2000.
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Kurzanalyse 24
To counteract the challenges in winter tourism, EcoAustria makes the following recommendations for action:
1. to ensure that winter tourism infrastructure can continue to operate profitably even in alternative weather conditions, existing facilities must be adapted accordingly. In view of the existing consumption of space and resources, it seems less expedient to build new facilities in the coming years. Instead, a reduction in capacity may also be a beneficial measure in some places.
2. furthermore, there needs to be a stronger focus on active tourism (adventure, hiking, cycling, etc.), which blends into the landscape in a way that conserves resources and redefines the adventure of alpine tourism.
3. the provision of attractive framework conditions for so-called digital nomads and internationally active workers also appears to be crucial. An important prerequisite for the destinations preferred by this target group is, for example, a high-performance internet connection.
4 The connection to public transport also appears relevant, so that the ecological footprint of the journey is also reduced, explains EcoAustria Director Monika Köppl-Turyna: "An attractive infrastructure offer must be created here at supra-regional level, which provides a fast and comfortable travel option from European centers. This also requires cooperation with the regions of origin of the tourists, through which it must be possible to shift more traffic to rail, which is currently not yet possible."
5. care must also be taken to ensure that public tourism promotion is geared towards precisely these objectives and that only projects that achieve these objectives to a large extent are supported by scarce public resources.
