Motives for Choosing a Ski Destination According to the British Ski Experts Opinion

This paper presents the findings of a preliminary investigation into factors affecting the destination choice of British skiers travelling to Bulgaria and particular, the choice between different resorts - Borovets, Bansko and Pamporovo. In the past various 'decision' elements can be found discussed in the literature, including income, family size, cost, accessibility, skill level, snow conditions and terrain diversity. However, in this research were given other suggestions related to the ski area - length of ski slopes, variety of ski slopes by difficulty, natural snow fall frequency and quality of the artificial snow on the ski slopes, capacity and quality of lifts and quality of ski instructors ability and ski hire equipment. Also, subjects like nature, transportation accessibility, hotel/accommodation quality, hospitality of local people and general "Value for money" are few of the most important features, which plays a role of a destination choice for the British skiers.According to the opinions of the specialists (respondents) shared in the individual interviews, the choice of a vacation destination and the formation of preferences for it is based on a recognizable image, a good reputation, awareness of the main competitive advantages of a given destination, and hence the importance of this image and reputation for the competitiveness of tourist destinations.