| Abstract: |
Climate change is a major challenge for weather-dependent industries such as
winter tourism. Existing climate change impact assessments largely do not
consider seasonality of demand and snow conditions are usually included as
binary variable (e.g. ski area open or closed). With this paper we want to
address seasonality of demand, timing of marginal snow conditions and
differential sensitivity of customers to marginal snow. Our objective is to
investigate the impact of climate change on ski tourism demand in order to
improve the basis for assessing the economic impacts of climate change. A
representative survey and choice experiment with 1312 skiers in 53 Austrian
ski areas is used as basis for this analysis. The impact of marginal snow
conditions on demand is simulated with preferences of skiers for certain ski
area attributes (including snow) derived from the choice experiment. Results
show that a lack of natural snow can cause significant demand losses of up to
17%. If in addition snow experiences turn to bad, our simulation shows losses
of up to 35%. Results suggest that demand losses are to be expected sooner
than suggested by impact assessments modeling operating days. This study also
shows that seasonality of demand combined with seasonality of marginal snow
conditions considerably alters projected climate change-induced losses of
demand. |