Ski resorts get a price comparison
Tuesday September 8, 2009 - Email this article to a friend

Well up to a point it is reliable and informative.

The latest edition of Where to Ski and Snowboard contains a comprehensive guide to the prices in different resorts.

There’s nothing very surprising about the top French and Swiss resorts having the highest prices, but one surprise is that Italy is about the same cost as Austria.

Many people would have said Italy would be cheaper.

The guidebook has worked out a Resort Price Index (RPI) for each of the major resorts with the average resort getting 100.  They recorded over 2,500 prices in resorts across the mountains.

Verbier; great resort but at what cost?Courchevel, France, has the highest score with 145 and Verbier, Switzerland, is second on 125.

Austria appears the best value with many scores of 85 to 95.  Even St Anton comes in below average, meanwhile the upmarket resorts of Lech and Zurs come in just above average. 

Italy too does well with many resorts around 80.

“If you went to a top French resort last season you can more or less halve your eating and drinking costs by going to a less fashionable resort in Austria,” says the co-editor of the guidebook, Chris Gill.

However there are some further surprises; one of the cheapest bottles of wine to be found was in Courchevel 1650.  It was 11€ (£9.61).

Here at PlanetSKI we reported on the high costs of lunch last winter as the exchange rate tumbled and found many more people doing things like taking sandwiches and picnics up the slopes.

See the PlanetSKI video below of how high the cost of lunch got and what people did to avoid the expense.

Saving money will undoubtedly be near the forefront of most people’s minds this coming winter and we will be continuing with, and upgrading, our deals and discounts section that was highly popular last winter.

Our How to save money guide is also undergoing a re-write at the moment.

The new feature in Where to Ski and Snowboard, 2010 is highly informative too and we reckon well worth a read if you want to save a bit of your hard-earned cash this coming winter.

Andorra, once a cheap place to ski, is now about average. We have already reported on how the price of a lift pass has been frozen, but is still way above what it was a few years ago.

Bulgaria is cheap with some bargain-basement prices.  Bansko comes in as the cheapest resort with a score of 40.

Crunching the numbersPlanetSKI is based throughout the year in Verbier, and whilst we would not necessarily argue with its position at number two there are many ways to save money in the resort.

So perhaps it is not as simple as just comparing resorts as there are widely different prices within each ski resort.

For example in Verbier a large beer in L’Atelier will cost you 7sf (£4.00) and during the mid-evening happy hour it falls to 5sf (£2.87). A meal in Chez Martin, below the main square, won’t break the bank either.

Lunch up the mountain in Le Cristal or L’Olympique will cost a small fortune, but a bowl of soup or simple dish in the lesser known restaurants of Chez Simon or Au Mayenne is very good value and will cost around 15sf (£8.60).

The section on prices in this year's Where to Ski and Snowboard is a very welcome guide as us skiers and snowboarders try to find a decent price in these hard economic times.

"Where to Ski and Snowboard, 2010" is published by Norton Wood publishing and costs £18.99. It's available from all good bookshops and many ski equipment and ski clothing retailers.

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