The skiing economy is a typical experience economy, so understanding the experience of ski tourists is essential to the development of the destination. To enrich the tourism experience research in the emerging ski market, this paper studies the 7118 online reviews of beginner skiers by selecting the main ski resorts in China as a case study. The content analysis method and sentiment analysis based on the domain lexicon and custom rules are combined to explore the perception characteristics of the beginners from the two aspects of experience dimension and experience satisfaction. Three main results were found. (1) The five main dimensions that affect the ski tourism experience of beginners are interaction perception, price perception, reputation perception, risk perception and functional perception. (2) For beginners, skiing is the primary purpose of tourism instead of being the critical factor of the positive reviews. They pay more attention to the pleasure produced by interpersonal interactions. (3) From 2014/2015 ski season to 2010/2021 ski season, the positive sentiment of beginners had no obvious change, while the negative sentiment showed a continuous downward trend, and the negative sentiment was mainly distributed among reviews on price, low temperature and service. This paper not only expands the research perspective of ski tourism, but also provides managerial inspiration for ski destinations interested in attracting beginners from the emerging ski markets.