Winter Games and Bargain Prices Aim to Entice Tourists to Europe

Riding the crest of a bumper-snow season, European winter resorts are seeking to seduce overseas skiers who deserted the slopes during the Gulf Crisis and low-dollar days.

From northern Sweden to sunny southern Spain, skiers are being lured by new enticements such as all-inclusive weekends, low-season hotel and meal promotions and free lift tickets for tots under 6 or skiers over 70.

But the biggest draw (or deterrent, depending on your degree of mountain madness) will be France’s hosting of the Winter Olympic Games Feb. 8-23 at Albertville in the Savoie Alps.

In a radical departure from past Winter Games, the French distributed the competitions among 11 resorts in an area stretching from Les Saisies to Les Menuires and from Tignes to Albertville. That’s more than 600 square miles of Alps to cover for 2,000 athletes and a million spectators, and they will be struggling to squeeze into 300,000 beds.

The XVI Olympic Games will cost about $800 million, but they will leave Alpine Savoie with sparkling new assets such as a new downhill course on Val d’Isere’s Face de Bellevarde, designed by the organizing committee’s co-president, Jean-Claude Killy, winner of three gold medals at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. The classic, technique-demanding course, with serpentine twists, swift chutes and great natural bumps, will bring the breathtaking jumps back to men’s downhill racing.

The women’s downhill in Meribel will also be a heart-stopper. The rule that limits the drop to 2,297 feet has been broken by an additional 500. In both cases, men’s and women’s giant, Super G and slalom will end up at a common finish line.

In France’s Les Deux Alpes, a powerful gondola now whisks 3,000 people an hour up a mountain from which there is, for moderately competent skiers, only one narrow descent. Megeve’s tourist office boasts that its lifts can handle 80,000 skiers an hour. And Italy’s Sestrieres, built at the start of the century by the Agnelli Fiat auto dynasty, can now transport 85,000 skiers in 60 minutes.

The fast lifts have meant the disappearance of lengthy queues, a rise in collision injuries and the birth of a booming after-ski (or instead-of-ski) industry for those too tired for six or seven hours of schussing down and up.

Telemark, a less frantic combination of alpine and Nordic skiing, is enjoying a raging revival from Sweden down to Sicily’s Mt. Aetna.

Cross-country has become more popular, with floodlighted tracks in idyllic places such as Alpe di Siusi, the largest mountain meadow in Europe, nestled high in the Dolomites.

Some novel after-ski activities that Europeans have dreamed up are antique car rallies in the Dolomites, indoor equestrian sports at Cortina d’Ampezzo and Madonna di Campiglio, art exhibits, high fashion shows, indoor tennis and squash and ice driving for stock cars at Sestrieres.

Typical of the new grab-the-tourist-with-everything trend is Italy’s Trentino region, with activities ranging from frozen waterfall climbing to hang gliding.

Director Carlo Guardini reports that the average skier now stays two long weekends of five or six days rather than the seven or eight days of yore. But they demand more than just a slope.

“Winter here has a thousand faces,” says Gardini, “and the French Olympics should bring new adepts to the sport after they see them on television.”

A quick ski around other areas:

--Italy: For only an extra $5, you can add all the resorts in the Dolomites to your $176 (high season) or $150 (low season) ski pass. This allows access to 450 lifts and 682 miles of trails in spectacular Alpine country.

Italy remains the realm of cross-border international skiing, with resorts accessible to France, Austria and Switzerland. Favorite jumping-off points are Cervinia (to Zermatt), Courmayeur (over Mont Blanc to Chamonix) and Sestrieres (over to Montgenevre).

--Switzerland: There has been a 40% drop in American tourists this year, but the Germans are making up the deficit. Skiers can check luggage straight through from airline counter to ski resort hotel through a new Swissair promotion designed to save hassle and hernias.

--France: Public transportation will be extensive and free, from the site of opening Olympic ceremonies to freestyle skiing at Tignes. Three valleys--each with its own character but linked by a network of 200 chairlifts, gondolas, cable car and poma lifts--add up to the most extensive integrated ski area in the world. And Meribel-based skiers can watch the women’s events, then ski themselves over into the adjacent valleys for ski jumping and Nordic combined at Courchevel.

Some French resorts are guaranteeing no Olympic overspill, and many French have changed their sacrosanct vacation plans to avoid the bustle of the competition. “This year we have lots of people calling us wanting to make sure we have nothing to do with the games, because they want to be able to ski, do cross-country, surf or telemark,” says Sandrine Gauthier of the Avoriaz resort in the southern Alps.

--Austria: Reeling from two consecutive winters without snow and a record snowfall last year, Austrian resorts are prepared for the best and the worst. Resorts made heavy investments in snow-making machines, while some towns are promoting winter bicycling, hiking and a local version of curling in case the snowflakes don’t start falling before the end of the year.

--Germany: Trying to capitalize on abundant snow but few heights, resorts such as Garmisch-Partenkirchen are offering two-day, $40 packages that include free cross-country skiing, drinks at local restaurants and saunas. Skiers can drive back to inexpensive hotels in neighboring valleys.

--Spain: Spanish resorts are the secret bargain of Europe’s ski world: brand-new lifts with low prices, spectacular sun and dusk-to-dawn disco and drink. The Sierra Nevada Resort Sol Y Nieve, site of the 1995 World Alpine ski championships, has built a 1 1/4-mile, four-seater chairlift with a capacity of 2,880 passengers an hour. It has added snow makers, an artificial lake and one of the largest cable cars in Europe at Al Andalus, which handles 3,800 skiers an hour.

Up north in the Pyrenees, Jaca, which lost its bid for the 1998 Olympics to Japan’s Nagano, poured millions into its facilities and linked them with neighboring France and the resorts of Formigal, Candanchu and Astun. In the Catalonian Pyrenees, Baqueira-Beret beckons with free skiing for those under 6 and over 70, while the tiny principality of Andorra has parlayed its tax-free status into low cost ski-and-shop holidays.

--Sweden: Rescue is on the way for cash-strapped skiers. The new non-Socialist government has promised to trim the 25% value-added tax that killed tourism in past years. This would mean a reduction of the standard $1,000-per-week package in an average hotel during peak season.