Touted by winter sports enthusiasts as having some of the best powder snow in the world, resorts in the Niseko area of Hokkaido are looking to Saturday’s official opening of the 2022-2023 season with great anticipation now that Japan’s borders have reopened and domestic discount travel will be available in the New Year.
Resort managers say reservations from both domestic and international visitors for the upcoming season are on the rise, especially with travelers from Australia, North America and parts of East and Southeast Asia.
The numbers can only go up, as the coronavirus pandemic effectively ended international arrivals. Foreign visitors to Niseko peaked at over 218,000 in the fiscal year that began April 2017, and there were over 160,000 in fiscal 2019.
Only 77 came last year, although this figure does not include those to surrounding towns such as Kutchan. Just over 1 million people total visited the town of Niseko during the past fiscal year, down from the 1.75 million who visited in fiscal 2019.
But alongside the hope that skiers and snowboarders from Japan and abroad will return, there is anxiety that a severe nationwide labor shortage will make it difficult to fill vital positions in the service industry, forcing large hotels and resorts to close off some of the rooms and make do with limited staff. The recent rise in coronavirus cases could also have an effect on how many customers the resorts greet in the coming weeks.
Smaller businesses, including restaurants and cafes, meanwhile, could also find themselves forced to reduce hours of operation or services due to a lack of part-timers in the kitchen or waiting tables.
“The biggest worries in Niseko right now are the coronavirus and its impact on reservations for the upcoming winter season, and being able to secure enough staff. In the case of foreign staff from abroad, there is the issue of securing a work visa for just the winter season,” Niseko Mayor Kenya Katayama said.
“There’s also the problem of the current exchange rate — a lot of overseas workers who need to convert into their country’s currency might see little merit in being paid in Japanese yen,” he said.
The decision to further open the border from Oct. 11 was welcomed in Niseko, even though many resort operators felt it came too late for them to adequately secure winter staff, either domestically or from abroad.
“With the border opening as late as it did, there was a lot of sudden pressure on resort companies to try and recruit workers. But it was hard to bring people here from overseas, to get their visas,” said Paul Wright, general manager of the Park Hyatt Niseko Hanazono.
He adds that, as the Park Hyatt is an international chain, the Niseko Hanazono was able to find the labor resources it needed, drawing on Park Hyatt workers from other parts of Japan and Asia.
“But most organizations in Niseko, and particularly some of the smaller resort operators, are really struggling to find people. They’ve come to the conclusion that they’ll just have to do the best they can this winter with whatever resources they can find,” Wright said.
The Niseko Tourism Agency’s English-language website had dozens of listings for full-time career positions and part-time seasonal workers at area resorts, bars, cafes and restaurants. Some places are even offering air travel and dormitories to entice young people in particular to come up and help out.
At the large resorts, having enough people to clean the rooms is critical. Traditionally, these jobs were often filled by Niseko residents as well as farmers and their families, who typically start after the autumn harvest season has ended and finish before spring planting. But with new resorts springing up in Niseko and the surrounding area, there simply are not enough local people to meet the demand for those positions.
“To turn the rooms over quickly and provide the level of cleaning that customers expect requires a lot of manpower. That largely came from the local community, with the wives of farmers and stay-at-home mothers,” said Scott Mountford, senior sales and marketing manager at the Setsu Niseko resort.
“We really struggled to find enough people for positions like hotel staff and the concierge team. At the moment, we're doing OK. But housekeeping is always going to be a crunch point,” he adds.
The resorts that can’t staff their large facilities — especially in January and February during peak season — may find they have to scale back.
“There are resorts that are nearly sold out for the peak winter period, but if they can’t secure enough staff, they won’t be able to fully open,” Katayama said.
Securing outside staff in a place like Niseko, where there is very limited public transportation, can make it hard to find people even if the hourly rates sound good to those from elsewhere.
Masanobu Saito, owner of the Niseko Bang Bang restaurant, said that hourly rates for part-timers at many small businesses like his are between ¥1,200 and ¥1,600 an hour, depending on the level of experience and the type of job performed. Many of the part-time staff are hired for four months, from December to March — the height of ski season.
“Niseko businesses recruit people from all over Japan, most of whom have an interest in skiing and snowboarding and want to spend the winter here working part time,” he said.
For Japanese workers, recruitment takes place nationwide. But even with the higher part-time rates and other incentives, it’s still tough to attract young people partially because, according to Saito, skiing is not as popular in Japan as it was 30 years ago.
“The population of young Japanese skiers and snowboarders isn’t that great," he said, "In the years after the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, fewer people went skiing, and their children today don’t have the same interest as their parents once did.”
Yet some resort owners, having seen Niseko’s international clientele all but disappear over the past two years, were forced to shift toward the needs of the domestic ski market.
The announcement by the government that it plans to extend a nationwide discount travel program into the new year might help boost the number of Niseko domestic visitors. But Ryunosuke Tanaka, marketing manager of Niseko Tokyu Grand Hirafu, said there are still unknowns about that market as well.
“The government’s national travel discounts as well as Hokkaido’s discount campaign are boosting reservations. But we still need people to come after the campaigns have finished,” he said.
It's with this mixture of cautious optimism regarding the opening of the border and serious concerns about staffing that Niseko’s resorts are gearing up for the 2022-23 season.
However, nobody expects things to instantly recover to the same levels of domestic and foreign visitors seen before 2019. The late opening of Japan’s border meant that many who might have booked a trip to Niseko had already decided to go elsewhere by the time it was announced. Therefore, some in Niseko are already looking beyond this season.
“Winter 2024 will be an absolute stunner. People abroad will have time to plan and book ahead. Since everybody in Niseko pivoted to the domestic market two years ago, I also think those people will be back in greater numbers as well,” said Colin Hackworth of Hanazono Niseko Japan.
“You wouldn’t be in the ski industry if you weren’t an optimist. But I don’t think Niseko will take that long to fully recover” he predicts. "This coming winter, especially February and March when airfares are usually cheaper, will be better than the last two. But how much better, we’ll have to wait and see."
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