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I went
shopping for lift tickets the other day
and...
Timothy R. Stark
Who hasn't dreamt
of chucking it all in and taking off to
ski around the world? No matter how much
you economize on frivolous items like
sleeping, eating, and your mortgage,
you'll still have to fork over cold cash
for a ticket to ride back uphill. I
decided to take a bit of a survey (no, it
wasn't scientific) and wasted an entire
day of my life investigating the cost of
a day's skiing in 2003 / 2004 at 50
resorts in 16 countries. To give a
measure of value, such as it is, I've
also calculated how much skiing terrain
each of these resorts serves up per
dollar paid for a lift ticket. And I've
found some interesting data!
I thought
Canada was cheap… And maybe it is!
If you're looking
for rock-bottom lift ticket prices, most
people assume Canada's the place to go,
but you may be surprised. Canada still
stands out as the world's second most
expensive country to buy a daily lift
ticket, after the ever overpriced Good
Ol' U.S of A. However, what I did find is
although Canada costs more at the ticket
window, it also gives you more terrain on
which to ski. So it's all a question of
value...
At $67 (including GST, at Christmastime),
Whistler is the only non-American resort
in the top 10 of the most expensive
resorts. Among all the resorts surveyed,
Canada's cheapest skiing is at Silver
Star ($48), followed closely by Sun Peaks
and Mont-Sainte-Anne (both $49). Big
White ($51) falls below the world average
of $54. Lake Louise, Sunshine and Fernie
are right on the money at $54.
Where Canada excels is in offering more
acres of skiing per buck than anywhere
else, not counting multi-resort ski
passes like Vail's Colorado Ticket, which
is valid at Vail, Beaver Creek,
Breckenridge, Keystone and Arapahoe
Basin. The Colorado Ticket offers 122
acres of skiing per dollar. But you have
to bus for more than an hour to get from
Vail to Breckenridge!
Expensive as it is, Whistler's $67 day
pass offers you the most acres of skiing
per dollar of any single resort on earth.
Indeed, all five of the world's
best-value resorts measured by acres of
skiing per single resort are Canadian:
Whistler (109 acres of skiing per
dollar), Lake Louise (78 acres), Silver
Star (64 acres), Sunshine (59 acres) and
Panorama (52 acres).
Extortion on a
global scale!
"Downhill"
is a term ski resorts never use when it
comes to lift ticket pricing. Price hikes
this year are averaging about two per
cent in Switzerland, three per cent in
Austria and France, and five per cent in
Italy and North America. Don't ask me to
get into currency fluctuations as well,
please!
Borovets in Bulgaria and Sierra Nevada in
Spain (yeah, I didn't know about these
places, either!) tied at $34 for the
cheapest passes. But for only $5 more you
can ski the sunny Italian side of the
Matterhorn in Cervinia. Down under, New
Zealand's Treble Cone ($39) is a bargain
compared to Australia's Thredbo ($63).
And the Andes is considerably cheaper at
Chile's Portillo ($46) than in
Argentina's Las Lenas ($60).
There's not much difference in
Scandinavia between Sweden's Are ($42)
and Norway's Hemsedal ($44). Japan's
Sahoro stands out as having the least
amount of skiing (175 acres or 3 acres
per dollar) in the world for the most
amount of money ($62). Andorra ($39),
nestled in the Pyrenees between Spain and
France, has skiing cheaper than anywhere
in the Alps outside Italy's Cervinia.
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