Depends on who you believe: the tourism industry surveys, the meteorologists or the good old farmer’s rule. An attempt at interpretation.
The question of how winter will turn out has tormented both serious prophets and questionable readers of coffee grounds since time immemorial. What the polar vortex is for the modern scientist for the winter forecast, squirrels or crawling animals were for the farmer (“If many spiders crawl in September, they smell a hard winter”).
Of course, such forecasting tools are no longer sufficient for the modern tourism expert. He also wants clear statements about the winter holiday business, which is why the old farming rules have been replaced by all kinds of surveys in the recent past. The British market and opinion institute Yougov claims to have found out by means of a much-cited study commissioned by the sporting goods manufacturer Schöffel that the desire to spend winter holidays is – to put it mildly – pretty much in the basement. More than one in four (26 percent) of potential winter holidaymakers therefore want to forego a holiday in the snow; Another almost quarter (23 percent) are thinking about cost-cutting measures for winter vacations.
Don’t trust any survey that you haven’t faked yourself
Irrespective of whether potential winter holidaymakers have not thought about cost-cutting measures in the past, despite these irritating results, no ski resort operator will have to put their snow cannons on Ebay any time soon. Other surveys such as the winter potential study by the Institute for Tourism and Pool Research in Northern Europe (NIT), which is based in Kiel, can remedy the situation. In any case, on behalf of the Austrian advertising agency, the NIT in Kiel determined that the number of people planning a winter holiday could reach the pre-corona level again at 17 million people. Some Austrian media supplement this number with a study by the Innsbruck marketing agency P8, which surveyed 300 Germans with recent winter holiday experience in Austria. One result: Of these, only twelve percent categorically rule out a skiing holiday.
But because you shouldn’t trust any survey that you didn’t falsify yourself, and certainly not one with 300 German winter holidaymakers surveyed, a completely independent flash study by the SZ among close colleagues showed that although everyone wants to go on a skiing holiday, winter comes late and the snow melts again early – as long as the heat creeps past the polar vortex.
However, since two-thirds of these colleagues unfortunately have no idea about winter forecasts, I would like to end with a reference to two folk sayings with a clear statement: “If October is mild and fine, a severe winter will follow.” And also: “If the leaves don’t fall before Martini, there will be a great winter cold”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/reise/.” What a severe winter and great winter cold mean in times of the energy crisis, however, exactly for tourism, requires another survey of course.