AUTHOR=Steiger Robert , Graiff Lukas , Peters Mike , Schnitzer Martin TITLE=The COVID-19 pandemic and leisure providers—Challenges, opportunities and adaptation strategies for ski area operators in Austria JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism VOLUME=2 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-tourism/articles/10.3389/frsut.2023.1136163 DOI=10.3389/frsut.2023.1136163 ISSN=2813-2815 ABSTRACT=
The COVID-19 crisis and the related nationwide lockdowns reduced the available types of physical activity, especially in the winter season. Besides closed indoor sports facilities, some outdoor sports were also inaccessible because of curfews and/or the closure of outdoor sports facilities. However, in Austria, the operation of alpine ski areas was permitted even during the full lockdown in the winter season 2020/21, albeit under strict hygiene requirements and capacity restrictions. This posed a challenge for ski area operators, with those heavily dependent on foreign multi-day guests facing severe declines in demand due to closed accommodation and closed borders while others were challenged by demand pressures from nearby population centers. We therefore want to examine how Austrian ski area operators managed these challenges, how they evaluated this extraordinary season and whether these new experiences and established measures can be used to improve customer experience in the future. We used a mixed-methods approach with a quantitative survey (