Mountain, skiing, and numbers

In his 2018 International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism, Swiss mountain expert Laurent Vanat, paints a comprehensive picture of downhill skiing, including of course snowboarding, ski-biking, etc.

This survey, including the winter of 2016-2017, shows the number of skier-days increasing by 4% over the previous season in spite of less than favorable weather conditions in Europe. According to Vanat, we are now looking at some 400 million skier-days worldwide.

Likewise, there would be 130 million skiers on the planet, which only represents 1.7% of the current world population. This number represents the total number of nominal skiers without considering their frequency of visits at ski resorts but that also includes skiers that did not ski during the current season.

Ski population is a tough number to ascertain and while Vanat credit the USA with 25 million skiers, I would suspect the real figure to be at most 10 million per season.

Like in many other domains, Laurent Vanat turns his readers' attention to China and its growth potential that could, under some scenarios, double up the current number of skiers worldwide, in a not so distant future!