Skalnaté Pleso (source: Sme)
Austrian ski resorts have been preparing for the winter season since summer. At the end of September they announced their new COVID-19 rules designed to ensure the safety of skiers, snowboarders, cross-country skiers and other visitors of mountain resorts, some of which became infection hot-spots in the spring of 2020.
Across the border to the east, Slovak ski resorts have not said how skiing in the Tatras and elsewhere in the Slovak mountains will look yet. For most of them, the last season ended prematurely, when the government-introduced measures forced them to close in early March 2020.
And so, while until last year the season depended on the weather, now the owners and operators of facilities in the ski resorts have to take the epidemiological situation into account at least as much as the snow conditions.
Ski resorts have been preparing for the upcoming season, but agree that there is no information about the rules they will need to observe to open. The concerns are not only about skiing itself, but about the infrastructure, including restaurants as well as ski rental and services.
“The situation is very insecure for all of us,” Kristína Jakubíková of the marketing department of the Bachledka ski resort in the east of the High Tatras, told The Slovak Spectator.
