How (Not) To Go Skiing On A Budget

Someone once compared sailing to standing fully clothed under a cold shower burning ten pound notes. Which would, I guess, make skiing standing in a blizzard in fifteen layers of clothing burning euros.

But you can go skiing on a budget! Here’s what we, umm, didn’t do…

1: Choose A Cheap Resort

We got off to a good start on this one, opting for Bulgaria, which is one of the world’s most affordable skiing destinations. Unfortunately, we then selected Bansko. It’s a fantastic resort, with over 1600m of vertical drop and a bunch of routes from top to bottom, but with one-day lift passes at north of 30 euros, it’s by far the most expensive in the country.

2: Book Flights Well Ahead

Flying EasyJet or WizzAir, you can get to and from Sofia, an easy bus ride from Bansko, from most places in Europe for well under 100 euro a head (including those stupid charges for baggage and credit card payments). That’s if you book well in advance. We, err, didn’t. Nor did we take student flights.

3: Bring Gear With You Or Buy It Somewhere Cheap

After spending November in northern China, we have a cold weather wardrobe well up to the challenges of a Bulgarian ski resort, or for that matter an English beach, and I was chuffed to find my ski boots and helmet still clogging my parents’ attic. So chuffed, in fact, that I completely forgot to look for our goggles…

4: Familiarise Yourself With The Currency

It’s fantastically easy to piss money up the wall when you don’t know what stuff costs. The Bulgarian lev (BGN) is roughly 2 to the euro. Yet, perhaps because the last time I visited Eastern Europe it was Communist, all the currencies were Monopoly money, and if you wanted anything serious you spent dollars in the hard currency stores, those 20-lev notes still feel like Lao kip to me. 10 leva for a Nescafe and a Twix? No problemo!

5: Stay In A Self-Catering Apartment Near The Lifts

We did this, enabling all sorts of savings by cooking for ourselves and buying our own food and drink (having first, of course, painstakingly identified the cheap supermarket in town). So far we have cooked at home precisely zero times and paid Paris Ritz prices for milk and cereal. While I’d like to attribute the barely-touched jumbo bottle of cheap beer in the fridge to abstinence on behalf of the adults in our party, I’m afraid quite the reverse is true.

6: Shop Around For Ski Hire

Our apartment came with a voucher for 50% off ski hire, which was nice to know. Just a shame a) that we left the voucher at home and b) when the store offered us 10% instead of 50% we didn’t shop around. Ahem.

7: Buy The Right Length Lift Pass

This is an embarrassingly basic error. Nine days of possible skiing, combined with the knees of a 50-something and an impending deadline equals eight days of actual skiing. Let’s not even go into the finer points of who needs a gondola-only pass, who needs a full lift pass and that, when your child says, “Why the hell are you buying me a nine day lift pass? Six days plus two days is cheaper,” they’re probably better at arithmetic than you.

8: Bring Snacks Up The Mountain

It takes a LOT of Twixes to bring a child who’s turned his ankle going over the tops of the trees on powder down the mountain in one piece. Skiing with kids? Buy your own bribes in town, take them up the mountain and try and refrain from eating the whole bag yourself…

Crystal Ski has some great deals on Bansko: click here to search.