Warming up to winter sports

"The number of visitors will be five times greater than during the 2015-16 winter season, the first after Beijing won the bid," Wu said.

He said the resort will see many more winter tourists in the coming years because a high-speed railway line linking Beijing with Zhangjiakou will be put into operation this year.

"About 90 percent of our visitors are from neighboring places, including Beijing, Tianjin and other cities in Hebei," Wu said.

The train will cut the travel time from Beijing to Zhangjiakou to about one hour and make tourists' travel much easier, he said.

Tourism flourishing

The winter tourism boom in Chongli is emblematic of a widespread phenomenon.

Chongli and Beijing's Yanqing district, spurred by preparations for hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, are just two popular winter tourism destinations attracting growing numbers of tourists.

China's northeastern provinces-Heilongjiang and Jilin-have long been the country's traditional hot spots for winter tourism due to their cold, snowy winters, and there are also some emerging destinations for winter tourism, including the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, and the provinces of Liaoning, Qinghai and Gansu, according to the China Tourism Academy.

Yang Xue, a 29-year-old resident of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, started to ski last year after being intrigued by her friends' social media postings about the sport.

"Many of my friends have been participating in winter sports in recent years and they seemed to be having much fun," Yang said, adding that she had skied twice at a new resort in a suburb of Baotou.

To promote winter sports, Inner Mongolia plans to build more than 200 skating rinks and 30 ski resorts by 2025, Inner Mongolia Daily reported.

The number of winter tourists in China reached 170 million in the 2016-17 season, with revenue from winter tourism reaching 270 billion yuan ($39 billion), according to statistics from the China Tourism Academy. It forecast that winter tourist numbers will rise to 340 million in the 2021-22 season, with revenue of 670 billion yuan.

The flourishing winter tourism in China has also attracted overseas enthusiasts.

Ted Wood, 56, founder of the International Sports and Media Development Group, grew up skiing in his hometown close to Lake Placid, New York, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980.