Italy's ski economy: a €12bn forecast with no published method, an €89 lift pass, and no official count of skiers

The €12bn is a forecast for the whole winter chain

JFC published its forecast for winter 2025/26 at the end of October 2025. Il Sole 24 Ore reported on 31 October 2025 that turnover of the snow-tourism chain was "expected to exceed 12.1 billion", up 3.6% on the previous season. Il Nordest gave the figure as €12.101bn the next day. Neither article says who commissioned the work, how the estimate was built or what sample it rests on. JFC's own report was not found; the only link in the press coverage is to an unidentified file-sharing document.

The breakdown matters more than the headline. Hospitality accounts for €5.9bn, or 48.8% of the total by our arithmetic. Sports services, equipment rental and ski passes account for €4.78bn, or 39.5%. Catering, retail and entertainment add about €1.42bn. Lift revenue sits inside the €4.78bn together with ski schools and rental shops, and JFC does not report it separately. A reader who treats €12bn as the size of the ski industry is counting every hotel bed in the mountains during winter.

The number is also a repeat. JFC estimated €11.674bn for winter 2024/25, reported by L'Adige on 12 November 2024 under a headline about "almost 12 billion". The step from €11.674bn to €12.101bn is a rise of 3.7% by our arithmetic, in line with the 3.6% JFC gives. A headline that says "€12bn" without a season can therefore refer to either winter. We found no JFC estimate for 2026/27 and no ex-post result for 2025/26, so the €12.1bn has not been checked against what actually happened.

The same forecast carried demand expectations. JFC expected total presences to rise 3.8%, foreign presences to rise 8% to 8.8%, Italian presences to fall 3.9% and day-trippers to fall 14.5%. It put the national rise in ski-pass prices at 4.1% and the cost of a week's ski holiday at about €1,550 per person. These are forecasts made before the first lift turned. Later coverage, including Avvenire in March 2026, repeated them as JFC estimates, and no result has been published to check them against.

JFC also produced the private estimate of Italy's tourist-tax revenue that we examined in our analysis of Italy's tourist tax rates. In both cases the company's figures are widely quoted and its method is not published. That is a reason to cite them as JFC estimates, with the season, and not as official statistics.

What a day on the Dolomites costs, and what the €86 was

The €86 comes from two consumer organisations that checked operators' price lists for 2025/26. Assoutenti's release, dated 1 November 2025, gives the Dolomiti Superski daily pass at €67 in 2021, €83 in 2024/25 and €86 in 2025/26. That is a rise of 3.6% in a year and 28.4% since 2021. Altroconsumo's survey gives the same move from €83 to €86. On Assoutenti's list it is the highest daily price; the lowest is La Thuile at €58. Neither organisation presents €86 as an average for Italy.

Dolomiti Superski published its 2026/27 prices on 30 September 2026. The adult one-day pass in high season costs €89, the six-day pass €453 and the season pass €990 if bought before the season starts. The release gives no previous prices and no percentage change. Its president, Andy Varallo, says the adjustment reflects inflation and the main cost factors, naming energy, raw materials, services and maintenance. By our arithmetic the day pass rose 3.5% on €86 and the presale season pass 2.1% on €970. Il Dolomiti reported on 1 October 2026 that the €89 applies on peak days only.

Other operators' own lists put the Dolomites price in context. Skiarea Campiglio charges €87 in high season and €89 on peak days at the ticket office, and sells online with dynamic pricing below those maximums. Livigno's high-season day pass is €74.50. Across the border, Ski Arlberg's provisional 2026/27 day ticket is €85, and Zermatt's peak "starting price" is CHF 89, with the actual price set daily by demand. A peak day in the Dolomites now costs about the same as a day in the Arlberg or Zermatt.

The consumer surveys show the same pattern a year earlier. Altroconsumo's 2025/26 list put the Zermatt day pass up from €94 to €106, which it gives as 13.1%; its own prices give 12.8% by our arithmetic, and St Moritz up from €97 to €103, while Chamonix held at €71. Its average rise for Italian daily passes was about 4%, close to the 4.1% national figure in JFC's forecast. Neither number is weighted by how many passes each area sells, because no area-level sales data is published.

The year-on-year change for Livigno depends on whose list is used. Assoutenti gives €66.50 in 2024/25 and €72 in 2025/26, up 8.3%. Altroconsumo gives €65 and €71 and a rise of 10.1%, although its own prices give 9.2% by our arithmetic. Against the 2026/27 price of €74.50, that is a rise of 3.5% on Assoutenti's base or 4.9% on Altroconsumo's, both by our arithmetic. Neither list is wrong; they were compiled differently, and neither publishes its sampling rules.

Assoutenti's longer series is the clearest record of how far list prices have moved. Its release compares 2021 with 2025/26 for the eight areas whose 2025/26 prices were out. The daily increases run from 18.9% at Cervinia Valtournenche to 38.5% at Livigno. The release headline speaks of rises of up to 38%, and its text says increases come close to 40%. That ceiling belongs to one area.

The antitrust case behind the price list

Italy's competition authority, the AGCM, opened case I877 into FederConsorzi Dolomiti SuperSki and twelve valley consortia after a complaint from SportIt, which runs the SnowIt sales platform. The concern was that the federation coordinated the valley consortia's prices and limited how they sold passes through third parties. The authority's decision quotes the federation's statute, which lists "coordination of the pricing policy" of the member consortia among its aims.

The case is closed. At its meeting of 4 August 2026, published in the authority's bulletin of 10 August, the AGCM accepted the parties' commitments, made them binding and ended the proceeding without finding an infringement. The consumer measures are worth €30m in total, of which €18m is in discount vouchers and €12m in refunds. A separate commitment to keep promotions stable is valued at about €20m, and the parties put the combined value of the measures for consumers at over €50m. A refund repays 20% of what a skier spent on valley passes in the seasons 2022/23 to 2024/25. A voucher is worth 30% of that spending and can be used on valley passes in 2026/27 to 2028/29. Both are paid first come, first served, and the voucher fund opens in three tranches of €6m.

For skiers the practical effect is a refund or a discount on future passes. The commitments do not set future prices, and the 2026/27 list was published seven weeks after the decision with a further rise. The decision does require the federation to amend its statute and run a compliance programme, and the parties proposed a monitoring trustee to oversee the commitments.

The decision also shows how little the ski industry publishes about its own revenue. It gives the federation's revenue as €16.1m for the year to 31 May 2024 and the valley consortia's 2024 revenue as €1.0m to €8.4m each. It gives no figure for pass sales across the carousel and no skier count. The authority did not rule on whether prices were too high. It ruled on how they were coordinated and sold.

What nobody counts: skiers, jobs and a price index

No Italian public body publishes a national count of skiers, skier days or first entries at the lifts that we could find. The figure most often cited comes from Laurent Vanat, a Swiss consultant whose International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism is sold as a private publication. According to SnowStash and SnowBrains, which summarised the 2026 edition in April 2026, Italy recorded 34.1 million skier visits in 2024/25, up 6.6%, fourth behind the United States, France and Austria. We did not obtain the report, so the figure is press-reported, and Vanat's method for Italy is not described in the coverage.

ANEF, the association of lift operators, does not fill the gap. Its national presentation of 18 October 2024 gives ranges, not totals: 4.4 million to 11.6 million tourist presences and 3.5 million to 9.5 million first entries, footnoted to winter 2022/23 or 2023/24 depending on the data available. The labels do not make clear whether these are scenarios or sums of areas. A study ANEF commissioned from PwC, reported in March 2026, counts more than 1,700 lifts and about 300 companies. We did not open that study.

There is no official figure for jobs in the ski economy either. The ANEF presentation gives a range of 7,491 to 19,450 local full-time-equivalent jobs, again without a national total. JFC's €12.1bn has no jobs estimate attached in the coverage we read. Any article that gives a precise number of Italian ski jobs is either quoting a scenario range or using a figure whose source we could not trace.

Prices have no official index. We found no ISTAT series for ski passes; Assoutenti uses ISTAT only for hotel and restaurant prices. The available measures are private. The two consumer groups compile operators' list prices for a sample of areas. JFC puts the national rise at 4.1% for 2025/26 without saying how it was weighted. The holiday-rental platform Holidu publishes a ski price index that combines passes and accommodation, reported by MF Newswires in December 2025. None of these is a price index in the statistical sense.

The missing skier count also limits what can be said about prices and demand. Assoutenti's release says that one million Italians gave up their snow holidays last year, and its president, Gabriele Melluso, refers to a fall of four million compared with 2023. He attributes the figures to official numbers without naming them, and the release gives no method. Without a national count, a link between higher pass prices and fewer skiers cannot be tested, and we do not draw one.

The infrastructure count comes from an environmental group

The longest running count of what happens to Italian ski infrastructure comes from Legambiente, the environmental association, in its annual Nevediversa report. It lists lifts that have been dismantled or abandoned, not the whole network. The series runs 132, 180, 234, 249, 260 and 265 in the 2020 to 2025 editions. According to montagna.tv and Avvenire, the 2026 edition, published in March 2026, counts 273 dismantled lifts, 106 temporarily closed and 98 that open only intermittently. We could not open the 2026 report itself.

The 2026 coverage gives the 2020 baseline as 131, one fewer than the 132 printed in the 2025 report. Either way, the count has slightly more than doubled in six editions. The number of temporarily closed lifts moved the other way, from 177 in the 2024 edition to 112 in 2025 and 106 in 2026. Legambiente also counts 231 lifts it describes as kept alive by public money, and reports that about 90% of public funds for mountain tourism go to the snow system. Avvenire's account of the 2026 edition gives 169 snowmaking reservoirs, up from 165 in the 2025 report, which mapped them by satellite. The reservoirs are the physical side of the snowmaking that keeps pistes open in dry winters, and their count rose from 158 in the 2024 edition to 165 and then 169.

That 90% is often confused with a different Legambiente figure. The 2023 edition carried a chart showing that 90% of Italian pistes used artificial snow in 2021/22, against 70% in Austria and 39% in France. The chart credits an elaboration of a swissinfo source and gives Switzerland as 54%, while the text says 50%. The figure has not been repeated in the 2024 or 2025 editions. It describes one season, from a third-party source, and should not be cited as current.

The lift operators read the same mountains differently. The ANEF-PwC study, as reported, argues that each euro spent on lifts generates about €5 of tourist spending in the area. That multiplier comes from an industry-commissioned study we did not open. Legambiente's counts and ANEF's multiplier are both partisan sources on a contested question, and neither is an official statistic.

Two provinces, two winters and the Olympic valleys

The firmest demand numbers for winter 2025/26 come from two provincial statistics offices, and they must be read separately. ASTAT, South Tyrol's institute, counted 14,780,459 nights between November 2025 and April 2026, up 3.3%, and 3,515,043 arrivals, up 3.6%. Its release of 5 June 2026 is preliminary. Nights fell 4.1% in March, which ASTAT partly attributes to Easter falling in April. Every district grew except the Pustertal, for which the release gives no figure. Bozen, the provincial capital, rose most, by 12.5%, and Salten-Schlern least, by 1.6%. The fastest growth came from a city district with no major ski area, so winter nights cannot stand in for skiing.

Trentino's winter runs from December to April. L'Adige reported on 30 July 2026, citing ISPAT, that the province recorded 8,017,671 nights, up 3.4%, and 1,947,945 arrivals, up 3.3%. The provincial press office had given 7,753,642 nights for winter 2024/25, and the two figures are consistent with a 3.4% rise by our arithmetic. Italians took 52.7% of nights. February was the only month to fall, by 2.2%.

The Olympic valleys went the other way. Val di Fassa fell 1.2% and Val di Fiemme with Val di Cembra fell 2.9%, according to the same report. ISPAT links February's fall to fewer nights in the ski areas involved in the Games, according to L'Adige, which itself describes Fassa and Fiemme as penalised by the Games' organisational effects. Fiemme hosted Olympic events, yet it lost ground in the winter the Games came. No national ex-post study measures what the Games did to ski demand, as we found when we looked at the Bank of Italy's reading of Olympic visitors.

The two provincial totals cannot be added. ASTAT counts all accommodation from November to April; ISPAT counts hotel and extra-hotel accommodation from December to April. Both include visitors who never ski, from city breaks in Bolzano to spa stays in Merano. Rising nights in the two provinces say that winter demand held up in the eastern Alps. They do not say how many people skied.

Snow

Snow is the input the industry cannot buy outright, and the 2025/26 winter was short of it in the eastern Alps. The CIMA Research Foundation reported on 14 May 2026 that Italy's snow water equivalent had fallen to about 48% below the climatological average for that time of year. The Adige basin, which drains most of Trentino and South Tyrol, was more than 56% below. These are mid-May readings of the water stored in the snowpack, published to warn about summer river flows. They are not a measure of how many days the pistes were open, and CIMA does not mention skiing.

The coincidence of low natural snow and rising nights in both provinces is a reminder that demand data and snow data measure different things. Resorts with snowmaking can keep pistes open in a dry winter; the cost goes into energy and water bills, which operators cite in their price releases. Whether those costs explain this winter's increases cannot be tested from published data, because neither Dolomiti Superski nor the other operators publish their cost structure.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers should treat €89 as the ceiling for a peak day on the largest Italian carousel. It is the top of the market. Livigno's high-season pass is €74.50, and Assoutenti's 2025/26 list started at €58 for La Thuile. On Dolomiti Superski the peak price applies from 20 December to 9 January and from 31 January to 20 March, according to il Dolomiti; buying online at Campiglio, and outside peak dates on Dolomiti Superski, costs less. A six-day Dolomiti Superski pass in high season works out at €75.50 a day by our arithmetic. Skiers who bought valley passes in the Dolomites between 2022/23 and 2024/25 may be eligible for a refund or voucher under the AGCM commitments. Our Dolomites travel guide and our guide to where to stay in the Dolomites cover the valleys behind these prices, and our list of things to do in the Dolomites covers the days off the pistes.

Tourism businesses and investors should not size the market from the €12bn. Hotels make up nearly half of it, lifts are not separated from ski schools and rental, and the method is unpublished. The measurable signals are provincial: nights up 3.3% in South Tyrol and 3.4% in Trentino in 2025/26, with the Olympic valleys of Fiemme and Fassa down. The binding constraints are snow and cost. A second winter with a snowpack deficit near half, or a reversal in provincial nights, would change that reading. Anyone underwriting a lift company should also note that the AGCM has made price coordination in the Dolomites a supervised matter, with semi-annual reporting and a monitoring trustee proposed.

Journalists and analysts can cite JFC's forecast with its season and status, the operator's €89 for peak days, Assoutenti's 2021 baseline of €67 for the same pass, the AGCM's €30m in consumer measures in case I877 with no infringement found, and Legambiente's 273 dismantled lifts, press-reported. They should not cite €12bn as the size of the ski industry, €86 as an Italian average, an 18% one-year rise in pass prices, one million fewer Italians on snow, or 90% artificial snow as current. The series finding this article adds is that Italy's ski economy has no official national measure of size, price or volume. The most quoted numbers come from a consultancy, two consumer groups, an environmental association and the operators themselves.