Harbin’s ski market entered 2012 shrouded in anxiety. The source of this anxiety comes not only from the threat posed by the under-construction largest ski resort in Asia on Changbai Mountain, nor just from other provinces and cities luring away Harbin’s ice and snow industry with slogans like “See ice in Harbin, ski in Changchun,” but also from those “makeshift ski workshops” that disrupt the market, damage the reputation of Harbin’s ski industry, and undermine the industry rules of the Harbin ski market.
Unregulated competition due to the lack of an entry and exit system has left Harbin’s ski resorts collectively crying “famine” during peak season — Harbin’s ski industry, which started earliest and developed fastest in China, is now facing a development dilemma both internally and externally.
Without “breaking the deadlock,” this sunrise industry may gloomily “set in the evening.” But if the market can be rectified and efforts consolidated, Harbin’s ski industry will “slide” into a broader future.
Widespread losses
――5S-level ski resort “300 staff serving 100 visitors daily”
“In previous years, from Christmas to the Lantern Festival, you could almost hear only Beijing accents at the ski resorts, but now you barely hear them, and even visitors from Shanghai and the Jiangsu-Zhejiang area have become rare,” said Liu Yichun, a relevant person in charge of Longzhu Erlongshan Ski Resort. “Beijing’s Lianhua Mountain and Hebei’s Wanlong Ski Resort have basically captured all the skiing enthusiasts from the Beijing area, while ski resorts in Hebei, Liaoning, and Jilin have intercepted even more visitors who would otherwise come to Harbin.”
“Relying solely on local skiers in Harbin to support the ski resorts would starve them to death,” said Li Bin, a relevant person in charge of Jihua Changshoushan Ski Tourism Company. A 50-50 split between local and out-of-town guests is reasonable for a ski resort, but since 2010, the number of out-of-town visitors to Harbin ski resorts has been declining year by year.
There are 13 S-level ski resorts in Harbin, and they all commonly cry “famine”: The period from Christmas to the Lantern Festival is the peak season for skiing in Harbin. Last year on Christmas Day, Jihua Ski Resort received 600 visitors, compared to over 1,400 the previous year. “On non-Spring Festival holiday days, ski resorts with over 300 staff serve just over 100 visitors daily,” said Li Bin. As a 5S-level ski resort, Jihua only opened 8 ski runs due to insufficient visitors.
The number of visitors to Harbin Institute of Physical Education’s Ma’ershan Ski Resort, also a 5S-level ski resort, has been continuously declining. Chuo Pengqun, director of the ski resort, said that since 2010, the number of visitors has gradually decreased, and this year’s reception volume has dropped by more than 30% compared to 2010. Currently, 80% of visitors here are local skiing enthusiasts, while tourist skiers are few.
“The number of visitors in the Yabuli ski area is declining overall,” said Chen Changpeng, office director of Yabuli Ski Resort. Yabuli has a total of 7 ski resorts, including two 5S-level ones. Although it was bustling during the Spring Festival, industry insiders have seen signs of crisis in the industry through changes in visitor numbers.
“All major ski resorts are operating at a loss, with both visitor numbers and turnover showing negative growth year-on-year,” said Liu Bing from the Planning Department of the Municipal Tourism Bureau. The tourism department only has data on the city’s 13 S-level ski resorts, including 4 at 5S level and 1 at 4S level, and the overall business situation is not good.
The ski industry is an emerging industry. Harbin’s ski industry started earliest and developed fastest in China —— Zhu Xiaohu, president of Longzhu Ski Group, who participated in the formulation of the local S-level ski resort standards, recalled that after the 3rd Asian Winter Games in 1996, using event equipment, Harbin transformed alpine skiing into tourist skiing, and a group of investors with long-term vision entered the industry. After 2000, Harbin’s ski industry entered a “spring,” with established ski resorts reinvesting to improve hardware and software, and a new wave of investors joining in seeing the growth potential. Starting in 2007, the upward momentum of Harbin’s ski industry attracted external capital, such as Macau Zhongqiao Group forming a joint venture with Longzhu Group to build Yabuli Yawangs Ski Resort, and Club Med investing in Yabuli Sunshine Resort Ski Resort.
“It took us over a decade to do what developed regions abroad did in decades,” said Zhu Xiaohu. The rapid development speed and large number of ski resorts have also concentrated the exposure of problems in Harbin’s ski industry.
“Everyone is very anxious,” said Chuo Pengqun somberly in the face of the industry’s predicament.
Under Siege
――“See ice in Harbin, ski in Changchun,” other regions are aggressively carving up Harbin’s ice and snow industry
A “major event” in China’s ski industry has put unprecedented pressure on Harbin’s high-end ski market —— recently, Wanda Group and others invested 20 billion yuan to build the Changbai Mountain International Tourism Resort. The ski resort to be built on the western slope of Changbai Mountain is designed by a Canadian company with experience in designing venues for five Winter Olympics, planning to construct 43 ski runs of various types, with a total length of about 30 kilometers and a drop of about 438 meters. Upon completion, it will be able to accommodate 8,000 skiers simultaneously, making it the largest ski resort in Asia.
“This ski resort will definitely open by the end of this year,” said Zhu Xiaohu. It will bring a disruptive comprehensive impact to China’s ski industry, and will at least promote an industry “reshuffle.” Industry insiders have a worrying view: once the Wanda Changbai Mountain Ski Resort opens, Harbin’s high-end ski resorts may be “finished.”
Before this ski resort opens, Harbin’s ski industry insiders believe the highest-end ski resorts in China are still in Harbin. Liu Yichun said, “Although we consider ourselves the ‘leader’ in the industry, other regions such as Jilin Province’s Beidahu Ski Resort have been competing for this market for many years. It’s just that Beidahu didn’t take off due to its own issues, and the two ski resorts in Yabuli — Sunshine Resort and Yawangs — brought in foreign investment and upgraded their hardware and software, otherwise this market would have been ‘captured’ long ago.”
In fact, other regions have been carving up Harbin’s ski market. “Even unique advantages like Harbin’s ice lanterns and snow sculptures are being contested by other regions, let alone the skiing industry which lacks climate and geographical advantages,” said Li Bin. Nowadays, the whole country is developing the skiing industry, and the competition is particularly fierce. China’s skiing market has formed a multi-polar situation with Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Hebei, Chengdu, and Xinjiang. While ski resorts in our city are “all operating at a loss,” ski resorts in other regions are still doing well.
Data shows: There are about 20 ski resorts in Hebei and Beijing, receiving 1.5 million visitors annually. Chengdu’s Xiling Snow Mountain Ski Resort claims to be currently the largest and best-equipped ski resort in China, using all imported branded skiing equipment. Xinjiang and Liaoning’s skiing industries are also fiercely competitive. Changchun has even shouted the slogan “See ice in Harbin, ski in Changchun,” deliberately carving up Harbin’s ice and snow industry. Some domestic travel agencies have included routes in their Northeast tours such as “Visit the Ice and Snow World in Harbin, ski at Changchun’s Lianhuashan Ski Resort.” According to media reports, during the Spring Festival, the total number of people skiing at Changchun’s ski resorts such as Jingyuetan, Lianhuashan, Xinlihu, and Miaoxiangshan increased by 18% compared to the previous year.
Secret Operations
――Out-of-town visitors struggle to find a “Harbin Ski Map”
If a visitor wants to ski, finding an S-level ski resort in Harbin is quite difficult.
Typing “Harbin ski resort” into various online search engines yields only information about ski tour packages from various travel agencies. And if you call 114 for information, you can only find Mingdu Ski Resort. This means that if visitors want to ski in Harbin, not only can they not easily find out which ski resorts are available in Harbin, or the level, location, and price of each ski resort to facilitate comparison and choice, but if they don’t know the name of the ski resort, it’s also hard to get in touch with it. The reporter found that even if they knew the name of the ski resort, apart from the two in Yabuli, it was still very difficult to find contact information.
The reporter finally obtained the contact information of Harbin’s 13 S-level ski resorts by sending a “private message” to the Harbin Municipal Tourism Bureau’s Sina Weibo account. But specific information about the ski resorts still needed to be obtained by calling each one individually.
“I don’t know why, but there’s very little publicity for us,” said the person in charge of a ski resort in our city. “Our hardware and software levels are top-notch in China. Anyone who skis here will come back. But the current situation is that we can only rely on a single source of customers — local skiing enthusiasts — and it’s hard to attract new customers, let alone out-of-town visitors. The tourism department provides very little publicity and support for us, and we’re not promoted online or in regular tourism campaigns. Of course, there’s also our own problem with business awareness — we’ve never cracked the code on building visibility.”
The most well-known ski resort in Harbin is “Yabuli Ski Resort,” famous for hosting events like the Asian Winter Games and the Universiade. But for most visitors, they don’t know that “Yabuli Ski Resort” is an overarching concept, including 7 individual ski resorts. What these 7 are specifically called, their levels, and their hardware and software conditions are even more difficult for visitors to find out.
Of course, there are also a very small number of ski resorts in Harbin that have their own websites, but they all face the same problem: “If tourists don’t know the name of our ski resort, they can’t find the website at all.”
In stark contrast is Changchun. If you search online for “Changchun ski resorts,” you’ll find the “Changchun Ski Website,” which introduces the names, locations, price lists, and discount information of various ski resorts in Changchun, along with sections on ski equipment and a ski forum. According to the website staff, the Changchun Ski Website is a subsidiary jointly managed by the Ski Industry Association of the Changchun Cultural Industry Federation and Jilin Guanzhong Information Technology Co., Ltd., with the primary goal of promoting the development of Changchun’s ski industry.
The Scars of Reputation
――Under the lure of zero-fee and negative-fee tour packages, travel agencies “fuel chaos” in the ski industry
A large number of tourists, having no concept of Harbin’s ski resorts, are taken by travel agencies to “ski shacks” and end up forming a terrible impression of Harbin’s ski scene.
A tourist from Haikou recounted his “painful experience” skiing in Harbin: During the Spring Festival, he joined a tour group to ski in Harbin. The tour guide pressured them to participate in paid activities—if they refused, they weren’t even allowed to wait on the bus but had to stand outside in minus twenty or thirty degrees Celsius. At the rental shop for ski suits, the marked price was 80 yuan per suit, but they were charged 180 yuan. Fine, if it’s paid, but upon arriving at the ski resort, they found it was just a small slope crowded with five or six tour groups, packed with people everywhere. The guide pressured them to pay for a ski instructor, and after skiing down, there was no cable car to take them back up the slope—they either had to climb back up themselves or rely on resort staff to “carry” them back up.
This tourist from Haikou had once looked forward to skiing in Harbin, but now says he will “never ski in Harbin again.”
Such experiences for tourists from Haikou are nothing new in Harbin’s ski industry. All S-grade ski resorts in the city are well aware of this situation but feel powerless to change it.
“We’re surrounded and marginalized by these ski shacks,” said Guo Peng, general manager of the 4S-grade Pingshan Shenlu Ski Resort. Taking this resort as the center, within a 10-kilometer radius, there are about 12 privately run ski shacks. These “shacks” require very little investment—just push out a slope in a morning, haul some snow down from the mountain in sacks, and they can open for business. In winters with no snow, like this one, they rent a snow-making machine from elsewhere. Their daily operating cost is only one or two hundred yuan, while a regular ski resort’s daily operating cost is at least ten or twenty thousand yuan. Yet, despite the huge gap in both software and hardware facilities between these ski shacks and legitimate resorts—and even more so in terms of safety—these shacks compete with legitimate ones in the same tight market for a limited pool of customers.
The business tactic of every ski shack is the same “one trick”: using zero-fee or negative-fee tour packages to lure travel agencies into “tricking” tourists into coming.
An insider from a travel agency revealed that the so-called “zero-fee” means the agency brings tourists to the ski resort without paying the resort a single cent—in fact, some ski resorts even give kickbacks to the agencies, which is called “negative-fee.” The ski shacks mainly profit from tourists’ optional spending on things like renting ski suits or hiring instructors, which is exactly what happened to the tourist from Haikou.
“Travel agencies aim to maximize profits—where the money is, that’s where they go,” the insider lamented. Even legitimate guides are profit-driven, and who would care about how out-of-town tourists view Harbin’s ski industry?
After the tourist from Haikou posted his experience online, it attracted numerous comments, shares, and attention from netizens, eventually feeding into the popular topic of “being ripped off during the Year of the Dragon Spring Festival travel season.”
“The whole pot of Harbin’s ski industry has been spoiled by just a few small fish,” said Li Bin. The ski shacks are damaging the reputation of Harbin’s ski sector.