Skiing in 2023 – A Summary

I always like to look back on our trips and work out what they cost us. I think this may feel alien to some, but for me this helps me understand what we can afford to do in future and plan accordingly.

We have both stopped working for the time being. Whether this is a permanent end to paid work depends on a few variables, but one of them is definitely whether we can afford to do the things we really want to do. And skiing is something we want to continue to do while our bodies are still able.

A few facts about our trip

While we’ve been away we have skied in the following resorts

• Les Saisies (Espace Diamant) (France)
• Samoëns (Grand Massif) (France)
• La Thuile (La Thuile/La Rosiere) (Italy)
• Courmayeur (Italy)
• Pila (Italy)
• Cervinia/Valtournenche/Zermatt (Italy/Switzerland)

In these six resorts we managed to ski for 22 days which meant we purchased 44 day or part day lift passes between us. From leaving the UK to returning we were away for 51 nights in total, some of those were in ski resorts, some in transit to and from the tunnel or between ski resorts.

What’s in the numbers

We have included our costs from the moment we arrived in France to the moment we left. We haven’t recorded our channel tunnel cost because it was almost free thanks to Tesco Clubcard vouchers.

We also haven’t included the costs of travel in the UK i.e. fuel purchased in the UK and our overnight stay before we left.

Neither have we included the costs of things like insurance (we extended out Nationwide cover, which meant that we were limited to 31 days skiing, we phoned up to ensure that this was not just 31 consecutive days in ski resorts) or equipment (we already have most of the equipment we need but we did have our skis serviced before we left).

The numbers

So how did the costs for this ski trip pan out? Below you can see the breakdown of costs expressed in GBP.

The total cost was £5081.51. This was approx £1000 less than our budget which was mostly due to skiing for fewer days than expected. We weren’t interested in skiing on poor weather days and we had quite a lot of those.

Compared to our last trip in 2019 everything has, of course, gone up in price. But roughly speaking most of our costs have been proportional. The big difference is the amount we spent on going out. In 2019 we spent £75.85 on going out, dining or drinking. This time we spent over ten times that amount. Why? We were being very tight with our budget in 2019, this time round we have a slightly different perspective on our spending. We wanted to set ourselves a less restrictive budget this time and we stayed within it, had fun and felt more relaxed as a consequence.

To toll or not to toll

One of our decisions this year was to use tolls to get to the Alps. This allowed us a speedy trip into France with easy driving for Paul (who is the only driver of slightly weighty Bertie, shhh we don’t want to be accused of weight shaming or poor old van). We justified this because I couldn’t finish my contract until March. If we had more time then we almost certainly would not use toll roads and would travel out to the Alps in roughly the way we returned on this trip ie via Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.