I Just Dropped $1000 for my Girls to Ski and they Lasted 2hrs

DanM wrote:

Cross Country skiing is a far cheaper alternative.

the last thing you want is to be around the winter version of marathon stickman weazles

A lot of people have to drop 1000+ bucks to have a good day/night. Be glad your kids got to enjoy it and did not involve the other kind of sking/snow that is expensive. A couple weeks back I got drunk and ended up being up most of the night paying an escort in total over 1 grand, closer to 1500 bucks that was not the plan but the liquor had other ideas. Hindsight is 20/20.

You should not be skiing it is a racist activity that is priced to keep African Americans out. Anyone who supports a ski resort is racist. #blm

Am on my mobile. Love the responses. I was just venting last night when I got to the room. Here is itemized for malmo and the likes -

Seven Springs Resort

Hotel Suite for 5- $463

Lift Pass- $59.50 x 3 ($180)

Ski Rental- $59.00 x 3 ($187)

Food- $68

That’s about the $1000 I quoted last night so pretty spot on. And the girls are super fit just super deep snow and about 18-degrees they went hard for 2.5 hours and were done while my wife and I had some food and drinks to chill. Would do it all over again. We’re just giving them memories we never had.

Just remember that memories don't care how much it did cost at the time.

From my experience the cheap stuff is worth remembering a lot more.

But I am sure that's just me being me.

Former ski bum wrote:

DanM wrote:

Cross Country skiing is a far cheaper alternative.

what

Not really. You have still exactly the same outrageous lodging costs as the skiers.

You can find low-to-mid priced lodging near many XC areas. Midweek is usually a much better deal than weekends. North Conway and Jackson in New Hampshire offer reasonable midweek prices - and the White Mountains were made for XC skiing. The Downhill areas in NH don't measure up to the Western US.

Is skiing in the US really that expensive? I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than 50€ for a day pass in France or Germany, but I’m a bargain seeker and not adamant about skiing in “renowned” resorts. Rentals are also not that expensive here, though my future in-laws had extra ski gear I was able to use.

Because of the covid situation (closed stations), I bought a touring set up. It’s a different type of skiing and of course you can’t do unlimited downhill runs, but I love hiking and exploring so I’m forward to it.

We went last year to the night skiing and the kids, neither of them teens, lasted the entire six hours, except an hour dinner-break. They had never skied before but they loved it. I thought it would be entirely unaffordable based on prices for various things, but they had a night-skiing package for families that included lift tickets, two or three hours of lessons for the kids, and all the equipment for something like $150-180! Food was fairly expensive, of course, and not high quality at all.

The only other expense for us was driving several hours each way to the resort and back from staying with family. So, night skiing was the right idea but spend some time looking for family ski packages to get a real deal.

Going midweek is often cheaper, but they usually don't offer the midweek specials in the week after Christmas.

rhinetalrunner wrote:

Is skiing in the US really that expensive? I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than 50€ for a day pass in France or Germany, but I’m a bargain seeker and not adamant about skiing in “renowned” resorts. Rentals are also not that expensive here, though my future in-laws had extra ski gear I was able to use.

Because of the covid situation (closed stations), I bought a touring set up. It’s a different type of skiing and of course you can’t do unlimited downhill runs, but I love hiking and exploring so I’m forward to it.

Oh yeah, it is very expensive. There might be a small independent ski hill which wasn't bought yet by Vail Resorts but for nice skiing you need to go to Utah , Colorado or Wyoming (Jackson Hole) and Tahoe area CA, NV.

Touring skiing is very very dangerous in the US. Avalanche danger is real. Before I moved from the Rhinetal to the US I was also thinking of starting to do ski touring but the more I learned about it, the more I didn't want to do it.

StandardSetter wrote:

Am on my mobile. Love the responses. I was just venting last night when I got to the room. Here is itemized for malmo and the likes -

Seven Springs Resort

Hotel Suite for 5- $463

Lift Pass- $59.50 x 3 ($180)

Ski Rental- $59.00 x 3 ($187)

Food- $68

That’s about the $1000 I quoted last night so pretty spot on. And the girls are super fit just super deep snow and about 18-degrees they went hard for 2.5 hours and were done while my wife and I had some food and drinks to chill. Would do it all over again. We’re just giving them memories we never had.

So you really spent 360-400 for skiing.

You can’t include the hotel cost.

Any Vacations nowadays which require hotel stays seem to brake the bank.

Free_the_thigh wrote:

So you really spent 360-400 for skiing.

You can’t include the hotel cost.

You need to include the hotel costs. It's not like you can stay in a cheap motel somewhere in Oklahoma while skiing.

And that is actually were ski resorts make the real money, hotels, restaurants, shopping, real estate. They have control over a lot of that. They control the newspapers, charitie, and the town councils. I lived long enough in a ski resort area to learn that ugly lesson.

That’s too bad that skiing there isn’t so accessible, not just pricing wise, but also geographically unless you live near mountains (with enough snow of course). I’m not sure what the future holds for small, low-mountain stations such as the ones in the Black Forest or the Vosges, given how unreliable snow has become. It probably won’t be good though.

For the next two years I plan on sticking to the relative safety of the Black Forest, and maybe the Allgäu as a friend of mine regularly tours there. The scale and wilderness of big US mountains would scare me too!

Former ski bum wrote:

Free_the_thigh wrote:

So you really spent 360-400 for skiing.

You can’t include the hotel cost.

You need to include the hotel costs. It's not like you can stay in a cheap motel somewhere in Oklahoma while skiing.

Seven Springs is a little bump in Appalachia Pennsylvania. The lodging was the OP's call. A better title would be "I just dropped $500 on a hotel for my girls. We slept 8 hours."

But to be fair, the skiing can be so much better in the US.

If you are on the right mountain you can have zero lift lines and yet super fast lifts and perfect conditions on dry powdery snow.

At the bigger picture skiing will go away soon in Europe. The higher resorts in the US will stay much longer. The bigger question there is, if there will be customers past the baby boomers and their kids.

Most Millenials, Gen Y and Z will have no money for such an expensive sport and a lot of people just don't care about it at all. Another problem for US resorts will be to have a work force. It used to be that they had young people showing up for a season or more, getting just along and be happy that they could ski on their off days. Now you have to bring money to work at the resorts. This might bring the ski industry down well before global warming, I think.

Quite an interesting topic.

I’ve been skiing for over 30 years. At this point, I’m honestly thinking of quitting. The prices, especially in the last 5 years have become insane. The industry is going to destroy itself.

Former ski bum wrote:

Free_the_thigh wrote:

So you really spent 360-400 for skiing.

You can’t include the hotel cost.

You need to include the hotel costs. It's not like you can stay in a cheap motel somewhere in Oklahoma while skiing.

And that is actually were ski resorts make the real money, hotels, restaurants, shopping, real estate. They have control over a lot of that. They control the newspapers, charitie, and the town councils. I lived long enough in a ski resort area to learn that ugly lesson.

The poster said it was a 4 hr drive. So the hotel was not really necessary.