Travel

Taxpayers will want to see value for money from UK Goverment’s rescue package for Flybe, while any air duty tax cut would affect carbon emissions targets.

Of all the vintage snowsports posters due to be auctioned at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh tomorrow, the one that perhaps best encapsulates the carefree golden age of pre-war skiing is Martin Peikert’s 1939 image for the Swiss resort of Gstaad. Wearing nothing but casual shirts and trousers – no need for hats or gloves, folks, even at 2,000m – a glamorous young couple are riding a chairlift towards two distant snowy peaks, their skis and poles resting against their knees, the gent puffing elegantly on a cigarette. Neither of them seems particularly bothered about the fact that their chairlift is swinging about 30 degrees off-axis – which is just as well, really, as its rakish angle makes the whole composition much more compelling.

Given the importance of ­timber to the rural Scottish economy – with 10million tonnes forecast to be harvested every year for the foreseeable future – readers will perhaps be surprised to learn that not a single wagon of timber has moved by rail in Scotland for 10 years.

In these challenging times, any opportunities for new income streams have to be considered. As well as responding to the recent Scottish Government consultation on the so-called “tourist tax”, CILT has been pleased to ­support interest in the topic by Transform Scotland, the Scottish campaign for a sustainable ­transport policy, which has conducted its own study.

Last winter, due to the historic lack of snow in Scotland’s hills, the competitive snowsports calendar was left with more holes in it than a Swiss cheese in a Wild West shoot-out. The organisers of the SkiMo Scotland ski mountaineering races were forced to cancel events at the Lecht in December, Glenshee in January and Glencoe in February, and it wasn’t until March that they were finally able to run the first (and last) races of the season at Nevis Range. The backcountry skiers and snowboarders of the Scottish Freedom Series also failed to see much action: the contests scheduled for Nevis Range and the Ben Lawers Range both had to be cancelled and, had the Coe Cup in March not gone ahead in somewhat marginal conditions, the series would have suffered the second total wipeout in its six year history.

Scotland on Sunday travel