Top coffee brands hit slopes to tap burgeoning ski tourism market

Top domestic and foreign coffee brands have opened more stores at major ski resorts in China as they look to cash in on the growing ski travel demand and potential spending of middle-income skiers.

In January, domestic coffee retailer Manner Coffee launched its first formal ski resort store at the Lake Songhua Resort on the mountaintops of Jilin city, Northeast China's Jilin province. It is located next to the steeper slopes and its business hours stay the same as the operational period of the gondolas. Earlier, Manner Coffee opened a few pop-up stores at different ski resorts in the country.

Manner Coffee said opening a store at the Lake Songhua Resort has been an unconventional expansion plan for the company.

Late last year, Californian coffee brand Peet's Coffee opened its mountaintop store at Beidahu Ski Resort in Jilin, and the store introduced flavored drinks and drinks packaged in aluminum cans designed for the ski resort.

The stores located on the hilltops occupy relatively small areas and some are operated in the form of mobile coffee trucks. Compared to sales revenues, it is more important for these brands to increase exposure and create special scenes at ski resorts, where high-net-worth consumers gather, experts observed.

"Snow tourism in China is expected to sustain positive growth in the long term. Supported by the continuous growth in disposable income and the consumption upgrade in China, consumers, especially younger generations, have been paying increasing attention to high-quality experiences when they travel," said Zhang Weilin, an analyst at the LeadLeo Research Institute, a market research provider.

According to Trip.com Group, China's largest online travel agency, nearly half of the skiers who booked admission tickets at ski resorts or related ski packages have booked hotels that cost higher than 1,000 yuan ($146) per night. Nearly 20 percent of consumers who booked skiing products on the platform spent more than 30,000 yuan annually on the sport, indicating that they are typically high-net-worth individuals.

For Jilin, with more than 70 ski venues and more being built, Beidahu Ski Resort has been a key tourism project mapped out for the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) in the province. During the 2022-23 ski season, Beidahu Ski Resort expanded its ski trails from 27 to 64 and it continues to expand the area.

It is estimated that the resort is on track to become the first in China with a tourist capacity reaching 1 million people during the ski season. About 70 percent of these tourists are not expected to be local residents, according to the local government.

As China reopened borders and eased COVID-19-related entry restrictions on Jan 8, the resort is foreseen to attract more foreign tourists, especially from other Asian countries, the local government said.

During the weeklong Spring Festival holiday in late January, Beidahu Ski Resort received some 48,000 tourists, up 25 percent year-on-year. The resort netted an income of 31.22 million yuan, jumping 62 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Meanwhile, facing high traffic and a high-net-worth population at ski resorts, top luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel, Fendi and Celine have launched their skiwear series in the past few years to grab more business opportunities. During the ski season of 2021 to 2022, Fendi operated a pop-up Fendi cafe at the Changbai Mountain Wanda International Resort in Jilin.

In China's first and second-tier cities, the average per capita coffee consumption volume has reached about 300 cups per year, which is close to the level of mature markets. The level has been significantly higher than the overall average per capita coffee consumption volume on the whole Chinese mainland, which stands at 9 cups a year, said a research report by Deloitte.