In reply to aostaman:
> A bit off the thread but sort of associated, I was skiing in Aosta in March, the pistes were empty. It was just after end of covid restrictions so not normal but if there is no forecast recovery next year I expect to see major hikes in lift ticket prices as resorts look to increase margins to cover the loss of volume.
Interesting. I was skiing in the Via Lattea in early January this year and it seemed pretty much as busy as the major resorts typically were - i.e. pre-pandemic - at that time of year. A fair number of the lower runs and the lifts directly associated with them were closed, but that was in large part due to the poor early season snowfall. It was still possible to get all the way from Sauze d'Oulx to Montgenèvre and back towards the end of the week - but without new snow fairly soon some of the connections would have started to become very sketchy.
The coronavirus restrictions didn't seem to be putting people off. Plenty of folks weren't wearing masks on unenclosed lifts unless there was a carabiniere at the bottom telling people to put them on. You didn't need a mask in bars and restaurants so long as you had a valid record of vaccination. The only places apart from enclosed lifts where we regularly wore our masks was in shops, and the circulation i.e. non-food-and-drink-related areas of the hotel. And then I tested positive for Covid on the last day of the holiday...
I don't know what the snow conditions were like later in the season this year, and how that might have affected the uplift businesses. If the snow conditions remained poor through the peak season then that would have made life difficult for them anyway, Covid or not.
My (possibly somewhat hazy) recollections from my days in Torino in the mid-1980s are that, depending on where you went - and outside of the weekends, half terms etc - the Aosta ski areas were usually fairly quiet anyway. Even Cervinia could be surprisingly non-busy on a weekday when the sun wasn't shining. Things might have changed since those days, though, and you seem to have much more recent local knowledge from which to speak, so please don't think I'm saying you're wrong, I'm just adding some further context based on recent (and not so recent) experience.