Winter Holidays

Now, before we get started, I have a bachelor’s business degree in tourism/hospitality which mostly focused on business, and extremely limited work experience in the industry. Now on to the post:

Ah summer holidays, the time where kids around the globe get time off school (and some adults get time off work too). What could be better than having time away from your obligations to spend time at the beach or by the pool, chilling and relaxing? Most jurisdictions should have school holidays in the summer, and some employers have their holidays in the summer. But I am here, as a crackpot, to convince you that school holidays should give equal amounts of love to winter as they do in summer. Especially in cold climates, and conversely, in hot climates. Summer holidays are the best time for airlines and accommodation providers. Kids are off school, some parents are off work, and everyone travels to go on holidays with their kids. Hotels are expensive and towns receive huge influxes of tourists. That’s perfect! If you’re a summer town and rely on summer town. Examples include beach towns in temperate and subtropical locations, towns in hills and mountains where people can travel to escape the heat, places near lakes and rivers, especially where people can swim, and many, many other destinations.

If you’re a winter town, however, you’re out of luck. What’s a winter town you may ask? Well the most obvious answer which comes to mind is ski resorts. Ski resorts are in fact winter towns, and indeed, ski resorts would benefit greatly from winter holidays. Over in the USA, for example, school kids have most of summer off, but go to school for almost of all of winter, baring a couple of weeks off for Christmas, where most travelling occurs to see families. Some states, such as Colorado however, have more ski areas than beaches, could you imagine how much Colorado’s tourism industry would benefit if the USA’s school children and their parents had their holidays in winter instead of summer? Switzerland has more ski areas than beaches, as does Austria. Could you imagine how much Switzerland and Austria’s tourism industries would benefit from winter holidays. Places like Greece, France, Italy and California would benefit from either summer holidays or winter holidays, as they have both ski resorts and beaches popular amongst tourists. Places like the South Island of New Zealand, which have excellent skiing but where the beaches are too cold to be enjoyed, would also benefit from winter holidays. Not everyone could afford winter sports (skiing/snowboarding, etc.) and there are people who can afford winter sports but don’t like winter sports. Some of those people would travel to see snow, especially if they live in warm/hot and/or dry climates which don’t produce snow. Whilst I personally don’t care for winter sports (even if I could afford them), I couldn’t think of anything better than sitting in front of a fire place, sipping on a warm beverage and watching the snow fall, after enjoying a day outside in the snow. As it unfortunately doesn’t snow in my home city of Sydney, Australia, I would spend my money on traveling many miles to see snow (I will create a post about this sometime in the future). However, not everyone shares my opinion of cold weather. Some people hate and wish to avoid cold. This is part of the reason why summer holidays are more popular than winter holidays. These people would also benefit from winter holidays. People travel to escape the cold. People from the cold parts of the United States of America travel south to escape the snow. Places such as Arizona and eastern California receive more tourists in summer for two reasons-because winter is too cold up north, and because summer is too hot. Winter is popular amongst domestic tourists in the USA who hate both heat and cold! This means that California has two climatic reasons to benefit from winter holidays, as well as summer holidays.

Tropical places also benefit from winter tourism. This is for two reasons:

1. People from temperate areas travel to the tropics to escape the heat

2. The tropics is warm all year and has only two seasons which are based on rainfall- the wet season where it doesn’t stop raining and storming, and the dry season where it rarely, if ever rains. The dry season in the southern hemisphere correlates with the southern hemisphere’s winter, and the wet season in the southern hemisphere’s summer. In the northern hemisphere the same is true (July=wet season and January=dry season). On the Equator, it gets a bit more complicated with either two of each season per year or no seasons where it’s hot and rainy all year.

For this reason, Australia’s north receives more tourists in the winter and the south receives more tourists in the summer (with the exception of Australia’s ski resorts and the desert, which receive more tourists in winter). Southern Florida in the USA, which also has a summer wet season and attracts people who want to escape the winter would benefit from winter holidays. Australian schools typically have 6 weeks of holidays in summer and 3 or 4 weeks in winter, but summer holidays are taken more seriously than winter holidays. If winter holidays were taken seriously, the ski, desert and tropical markets would benefit greatly. However, this would even more be the case in Europe and the USA, where there are virtually no winter holidays and an abundance of summer holidays. Adult travellers who wish to avoid school holidays would also benefit from equal amounts of summer and winter school holidays, rather than copious amounts of summer holidays. Of coarse, this doesn’t consider people who wish to travel to see autumn leaves, nor people who work office hours and can only have one set of holidays per year (which in most places in summer), but it’ll at least solve some problems. Australia also has autumn school holidays, mostly for Easter, and much of our leaf peeping happens due to subtropical deciduous trees, which lose their leaves to survive hot dry summers, so autumn and spring should also have holidays for those people. Australia has spring holidays too, but not enough for leaf-peepers, and I don’t know what to do about leaf-peeping. Plus if we sacrifice summer holidays for the benefit of winter holidays, summer towns will lose out on current revenue. All I know is that in my opinion, winter holidays need to be taken more seriously as a concept. However, I am just one person with one opinion. If you create a committee of people who are smarter than me discussing various ideas, perhaps we could implement winter holidays in a smart matter