Most Italian Ski Areas Cleared to Open from Monday 15th February

Most Italian ski areas will be allowed to re-open their ski lifts from Monday 15th February, it currently appears.

The date has been in the calendar for some time but previous dates have come and gone without any real hope resorts would re-open. This time it currently looks more promising for most areas.

The Italian government's Technical Scientific Committee has ruled ski areas in "yellow zones" under the country's new tiered lockdown rules, can open from the 15th. Current yellow and orange zones are highlighted in the map above.

Normal pandemic operating procedures for ski areas the world over are to be in place including mask-wearing, social-distancing and the promotion of online ticket sales.

They rejected a proposal from the regions concerned to allow ski areas in orange zones to re-open with a 50% capacity reduction on lifts and the mandatory use of Ffp2 masks.

It is also currently unclear if Italians will be able to travel from a higher risk zone into a yellow zone to ski.

If Italy's ski lifts do start turning again it will leave only France of the 'big four' Alpine ski nations where the lifts remain out of action.

The opening of Italy's ski lifts is not the same as the resumption of ski tourism, particularly international ski tourism.

Yes, can't believe they'd welcome the tourist from UK with the open arms although the ski areas would love to get back to normal... as all of us. I've pretty much stopped planning the "escapes to the snow" for this season :(
On a positive side there will be 2 weeks of Alpine skiing from Cortina on Eurosport from 8 February ...to make us all to miss snow and skiing :)

Even if we could go and Europe will let us in when we come back we might have to pay £800 just to get back in....I can't see it happening

flat country skier wrote:
On a positive side there will be 2 weeks of Alpine skiing from Cortina on Eurosport from 8 February ...to make us all to miss snow and skiing :)

I love this if it helps to get everyone in the mood:

How many Brit skiers are there yearly?

Sonofapreacher wrote:How many Brit skiers are there yearly?

Hard to know really. Ski Clubs's 2019 report reckoned 50% of British skiers have skied Italy at some point, 25% in past 3 years and 13% in 18-19 season. So 13% of what? Some reports claim there are currently 750,000 active British skiers, others as many as 6 million (maybe that's "have ever been skiing"?).

Statista say 1.76m annually Brit skiers worth £2.9bill.

I'd have guessed around 1m skiers myself.

At 10% market share as a low estimate, thats around 100,000 min go to Italy...?

Crikey that's a huge loss of income for all involved and it's not looking good if you want to do a ski season next year as limited to 90 days in any 180 period and if looking for work it's going to be europeans first for employment and Brits 2nd. I have spoken to some bulgarian friends who work in hotels who are all re-training to be ski instructors and speak good english hoping to poach these jobs as will other european's such as slovaks, czech republic and poland who all love to ski.