Abstract

Considering the increasing stress of competition in winter sports, e.g., caused by the increasing popularity of sun holidays in the winter season or recently developed new ski areas, cable-car companies have to optimize their price-performance ratio with a modified marketing management approach. For most decisions regarding the marketing mix (e.g. the price calculation of new supply attributes), the knowledge about the monetary value of the different single attributes a consumer receives when purchasing a ski-lift ticket is indispensable. Since economics in general has a certain value for practical decision-taking in leisure management we follow other authors and transfer the economic concept of ‘hedonic prices’ to the field of empirical leisure research to derive the monetary value of some core service attributes in winter sports. The study is based on data of n=260 ski areas in five countries of the European Alps (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland). While the developed hedonic price models show rather high-variance explanatory power, most of the estimated attribute prices differ significantly between the countries studied. Possible implications for the price and product policies of cable-car companies are presented and discussed. Verf.-Referat