New club for international networking with skiing-interested industry colleagues from 31 countries and as a platform for fact-based and unbiased discussion about winter sports and holidays in Austria.
The newly founded "Ski Club of Austrian Journalists" (SCÖJ) began its activities on November 15, 2024. The non-profit association is, on the one hand, the representative of Austria in the "Ski Clubs International des Journalistes (SCIJ)" registered in Brussels and, on the other hand, serves to maintain friendly relations among journalistic colleagues with a focus on winter sports activities and also functions as a platform for fact-based and unbiased discussions about skiing and winter sports, including their socio-political and economic implications in Austria. This will take place as part of regular events. The international ski club SCIJ has existed since 1955 and comprises around 1,000 journalists from 31 countries.
The need for such discussion events and meetings to exchange experiences with competent industry representatives is also underlined by a recent study on the image of skiing in Austria, commissioned by Ski Guide Austria and SCÖJ. The representative survey of 1,500 Austrians over the age of 16 - carried out by the Institute for Demoscopy and Data Analysis (IFDD) - clearly shows that 48 percent of respondents believe that alpine skiing/winter holidays have an image problem (in contrast to 43 percent who take the opposite view). 92 percent believe that the causes of the image problem are that prices are too high, and 48 percent also believe that there is a particular lack of low-threshold, affordable offers for families, low-income people and those returning to skiing.
Another alarm signal for the tourism industry should be that 55 percent - and even 68 percent among young people and city dwellers - say that skiing and winter holidays have an image problem for environmental reasons such as climate change/lack of snow, energy consumption, high carbon footprint, interference with nature or travelling by car. After all, the industry has been trying for years to prove the opposite by pointing out continuous environmentally friendly and energy-saving activities with great commitment and effort.
What is fundamentally positive for the industry and its future prospects is that 44 percent of Austrians answered yes to the question "Do you ski or do you do any snow sports?" It is also encouraging that this figure is particularly high among young people under 30 at 79 percent.
The founders of the SCÖJ are Dr. Günter Fritz and Fred Fettner, editors and authors of the Ski Guide Austria, the standard work on winter sports in Austria on and off the slopes, which has been published for 16 years. Günter Fritz was, among other things, a founding member of the WirtschaftsBlatt and a long-time author of the magazine News, for which he continues to work as a freelance journalist alongside other media. Fred Fettner is a tourism journalist with decades of experience and publisher and editor-in-chief of the specialist medium "TourismusWissen-quarterly". The first members of the association are colleagues from Standard, ATV, Krone and Presse. Ordinary members must derive their income primarily from journalistic work and either hold a journalist's card or have proven relevant industry experience. The SCÖJ is also open to supporting extraordinary members from the industry.
For further information, please contact Dr. Günter Fritz, +43 660 6001477, fritzcom@chello.at or Fred Fettner, +43 664 4373432, fred.fettner@speed.at.