Let’s make no bones about it; family ski holidays are expensive; all those costs for your family’s lift passes, rentals and ski school are multiplied by three or four, depending on how many there are in your family group, and you may have to add on nursery care. You can save by sharing rooms or an apartment, eating in and perhaps all travelling down together on a self-drive, but some costs are more difficult to minimise, however you approach them.
The lift pass is one big part of the family ski holiday cost, but it’s worth knowing that while a family of four could pay the best part of £1,000 for four passes at a top-end resort, you can knock a half, even two-thirds, off that cost if you shop around. The problem is it involves a lot of maths. The thing is that different countries approach child lift ticket pricing differently, and then resorts within each country approach pricing for kids differently again.
In France children tend to have to pay for passes from age four or five, and often about 75% of the adult price even then. When they reach age 12 or 13, it ’s the full adult price, and with the most expensive French passes now around the €300 (around £ 266) mark, that’s a lot of pass cost. The good news is most French resorts offer a percentage discount, often around 20% on the total bill if a family all buy their tickets together, so you can save there and sometimes increase the saving by buying in advance online, which sometimes unlocks a further discount.
It’s well worth shopping around as you work out your overall family holiday cost.
In the other leading nations it is more common for children not to have to pay until they are six or seven, and in some cases even eight years old, so if your children are in their early school years, you may be able to take them out of having to pay altogether by choosing the right resort. It’s likely the child price will behalf the adult price or less in Austria and Switzerland and also that discounts will continue to an older age in childhood, perhaps to 16 or 18, so even if you do have to pay, the child price will probably be much less, even for teenagers.
So it’s well worth shopping around as you work out your overall family holiday cost. The difficulty is that the age from which children pay, and the age to which they receive a discount, and how big that discount is, varies from resort to resort, and the one that’s the best value for you will vary depending on the number and ages of your children. While you might not want to plan your whole holiday around it, it is worth doing your research to really get the best value for money when it comes to your family’s lift passes.
