**Section 3**

**Tourism Industry – Different Topics for Strategy Development** 

294 Strategies for Tourism Industry – Micro and Macro Perspectives

Williams, J. & Lawson, R. 2001, 'Community Issues and Residents Opinions of Tourism',

WTO (World Tourism Organization). 2001, *Tourism 2020 Vision Vol.* 7, Global Forecast and

*Annals of Tourism Research,* Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 269–90.

Profiles of Market Segments, WTO, Madrid.

**14** 

Sergej Težak

*Slovenia* 

**Modern Cableways –** 

*Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Maribor* 

**The Base of Mountain Sports Tourism** 

Most of the population nowadays lives and works in surroundings that not always healthy and clean. Therefore, the need to take a rest in clean natural environment is so much greater. Mountain regions feature the largest surface of clean natural environment where people go for a holiday. These places are accessible by a road, cableway and via footpaths and cyclist paths. Trends nowadays are active holidays that are offered by mountain sports centres during winter and summer. (Rauzi, 2008) In winter time main activities are alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, sleighing, skating and others performed in natural environment. In summer time, main activities are mountaineering, mountain tracking, cycling and others. Cableways are mostly used by skiers with bigger demands than in the past, this results in greater disturbance of natural environment. Parking places are a special problem. Locations of parking places mostly depend on accessible cableways. In economical and ecological point of view, a difference exists in whether parking places are located at the foothills of the

Cableway companies involved in the transport of passengers in mountain areas realize most traffic during the winter months, when passengers are mainly skiers. Ever cableway company tends to offer best quality service and long queues of skiers waiting in front of slow cableways may have very negative influence on the quality of service of mountain tourist centres. The problem of the skiers queuing in front of slow cableways may be solved by limiting the number of sold skier's tickets, but this does not mean the skiers in a major ski centre with several cableways would be uniformly distributed per cableways. Similarly, by selling seasonal ski tickets it would be impossible to determine which would be the peak

Most frequently, the problem of queuing skiers at cableways is solved by installing faster cableways with greater capacities, i.e. introducing chairlifts with detachable grips into service. These make possible to detach the chairs in the starting and final station from the carrying-hauling rope, thus providing comfortable loading and unloading. Modern chairlifts with detachable grips enable faster carriage of passengers. They have the possibility of transporting more passengers over the same distances. However, this onesided solution, the replacement of an older chairlift with fixed grips by the new chairlift with detachable grips can lead also to some unexpected consequences that may have a

days, i.e. on which days there would be fewer skiers on the ski slopes.

**1. Introduction** 

mountain or in hilly or woody areas.
