The heavy snow that arrived at the end of last year in north China brought thriving business to the ski resorts. Although the resort ticket prices surged 20 to 30 percent during the three-day New-Year holiday, the reception climbed rapidly and almost all of the big resorts in Beijing were packed.

Statistics show that the daily reception of Beijing’s suburban ski resorts of Badaling, Jundushan, Lianhuashan Shijinglong, etc. during the holiday went up to 1,000 to 2,000 persons, and some resorts opened till 11 o’clock at night. It is estimated that 100,000 citizens celebrated the New Year with the joy of skiing, and the number is likely to grow during the Spring-Festival holiday.

In front of Nanshan Ski Resort was a 2-km long line of automobiles, and it was even more crowded inside the resort. All the resorts ran out of ski coaches, each one of whom sometimes had to train 4 to 5 groups of skiers a day. Lines were queued up everywhere: at the resort entrances, the gears rental counters, the lifts, the cable car stations, even the dining halls. Some resorts even had a shortage of ski gears: during the holiday two suburban resorts had to shut out 3,000 skiers due to lack of ski gears.

The skiing heat was not limited in Beijing, it is reported that the resorts in Xinjiang, Shandong and the three Northeastern provinces all received large amounts of skiers during the New-Year holiday and reaped a sharp growth of turnover over the same period of previous years.

 Skiing as a sport is attracting more and more interest from Chinese people, offering the ski market a huge potential of growth..