PESHAWAR, Jan 28: The foreign experts, who studied procurement requirements for restoring Malam Jabba Ski Resort, declared its slope inappropriate for any developing skier, leaving behind questions about the need to develop it as a skiing area.

“By any western standards, Malam Jabba as a ski resort is of extremely poor quality,” contains a USAID-sponsored study titled ‘Malam Jabba Lift Design-Build project on site condition assessment and procurement requirement.’

The study was finalised in May 2010 as part of the foreign agency’s initiative to help Pakistan rebuild the ski resort and aerial lift that the Swat Taliban had burnt after they took over Swat in 2008.

Zahoor Durrani, a Peshawar tour operator, told Dawn on Wednesday that the ski resort had a tremendous potential to attract domestic tourists from Karachi, Lahore, and Faisalabad.

He said that Malam Jabba Ski Resort should be rebuilt with a focus to tap domestic skiing enthusiasts and tourists from Karachi and Lahore instead of looking towards the foreign markets.

The two foreign consultants, who conducted the USAID-sponsored procurement requirement assessment, reported in their final report that the foreigners should consider visiting the resort as a tourist spot instead of a skiing place.

“The ski slope itself consisted of a single run. This run was fairly steep and very inappropriate for any developing skier,” wrote Gabriel Hayden and Gary Hayden, who co-authored the report.

The topography, according to them, of the site is simply not accommodating to a ski area.

Mr Durrani said that an Austrian skiing expert had also come up with the same conclusion back in 1986-87 when a Peshawar hotelier took him to the area, seeking his input for improving the skiing facility.

“The Austrian suggested to Adil Shah, the late brother of Provincial Minister for Tourism Aqil Shah, that the slope needed to have more greenery to be able to firmly hold the snow without which it would not be fit for skiing,” said the tour operator.

The foreign consultants in their last year’s analysis of the site have suggested that “it might be more instructive for a western viewer to think of Malam Jabba as a vacation spot, a resort, in the mountains built around a hotel, with an associated aerial lift.”

Mr Durrani said that foreigners were not likely to return to the restive Swat valley for many years to come in view of the existing security situation, therefore the government should redevelop the spot to capture wealthy domestic tourists, who couldn’t take their families to Europe, but would still love to spend time in serene places.

Even prior to the Taliban’s takeover of the resort and its subsequent destruction in 2008, foreigners from among the Islamabad-based diplomatic community used to visit Malam Jabba for fulfilling their skiing passion, added Mr Durrani.

“A few hundred foreigners used to visit Malam Jabba, whereas the domestic tourists thronged the place in thousands every winter and summer,” he said. According to the USAID report, weekends and holiday attendance during peak periods was reported to be between 1,000 and 4,000 and weekday attendance was estimated at 200-400.

Another tourism expert said that Malam Jabba had tremendous tourism potential, but it could not be developed as a busy and attractive tourist spot because of incompetence on the part of those, who were running its operations.

This also reflects from the consultant’s report. The foreign experts have pinpointed flaws in the resort’s business model. It points out that the resort suffered due to poor maintenance and its operating agency was running it more as tourist spot than a skiing attraction.

Mr Durrani, when asked, said that the resort was primarily built, with the financial and technical assistance of the Austrian government in the 1980s, as a skiing facility than a tourist attraction.

“The Austrians also set up Pakistan-Austria Institute for Tourism and Hotel Management at Gulibagh, Swat, to promote the ski resort and attract ski lovers from abroad,” added Mr Durrani.

The lodge was a training facility and did not mean to be a hotel when it was built in the 1980s, he said. The Austrians, he added, had a plan to send the resort’s staff to Austria for training to run and maintain the facility on professional lines, but it did not happen.

“The federal government saw the impressive lodge as a hotel than a training facility, compromising the facility’s future for all times to come,” he said.