planning a ski trip – an example

Planning a ski vacation is like planning any vacation: the big ticket items are travel, accommodations, and food. This post isn’t going to toss around precise numbers, because there’s no chance anyone could replicate the same totals absent sheer luck. What is relevant is making sure your comparisons are apples-to-apples, and sifting through the details to catch the gotchas that tend to muck up otherwise reasonable estimates.

Our outbound airport was Orlando, and our timing wasn’t flexible. We only ski weekdays and outside peak periods, which usually means Sunday to Friday. That does two things: it avoids the weekend crush on the mountain, and it avoids the weekend pricing bump in lodging.

Step 1: Build a domestic baseline

Our usual ski destinations are Park City, Utah and resorts in Colorado. I started by comparing the same Sunday-to-Friday window across a few places, using the same assumptions:

• We prefer a place with a full kitchen, because dining out in ski towns can get absurd fast. (That said, if the kitchen requirement adds, say, more than $200 a night, it may be cheaper—and more relaxing—to dine out.)
  
• A kitchen only “counts” if you can actually use it—meaning there’s a grocery store nearby (or a grocery delivery service).
  
• If you’re not slope-side, avoid places where you’ll be the last to board a shuttle. At one place we stayed, we got up early and waited in the morning cold—only to watch the shuttle pass us by because it was already full. Not fun.
  

I don’t remember the exact numbers—and that’s fine, because they’d be different now anyway—so I’ll summarize the lodging result with a technical term: Ouch.

Step 2: Travel costs (where the gotchas live)

Airfare is trickier than it looks because ski trips come with a hidden line item: gear.

Ski bags aren’t treated the same across airlines, and policies change. Some airlines are generous, some are not, and some look generous until you read the fine print. To compare apples to apples, I had to include checked-luggage costs for ski gear in the total.

Then there’s ground transport:

• Park City is convenient because you can often do airport → resort without renting a car.
  
• Colorado resorts often require a car rental in Denver or a paid transfer. Neither is cheap.
  

After doing my best to normalize all that, travel costs landed around “Yeow”—nausea, but not flat-out stomach churning. And interestingly, for our situation, Park City and Colorado came out roughly neck-and-neck once all the extras were counted. My wallet was unhappy. Very unhappy.

And that’s when I said: hold it—what happens if we widen the map to Europe?

Step 3: Europe, narrowed by the pass

Because of a season pass I’d bought (I’m leaving it unnamed on purpose—I don’t want anything I write to read as an endorsement), we could ski Crans-Montana and Andermatt in Switzerland without paying extra for lift tickets. Switzerland, it is.

A quick search showed that Zurich was the most practical city to fly into. The next practical fact: Crans-Montana isn’t especially simple by public transit, and since we were traveling with ski gear anyway, a car rental became the obvious move.

And once you commit to a car, you inherit a lodging requirement that can quietly raise prices: parking. I’ll note here that overseas lodging would have been noticeably cheaper if we didn’t require a dedicated parking space.

Step 4: Ballpark comparison (not precision)

Again, these are ballpark numbers from that planning moment, not eternal truth—but they’re useful for scale:

• Domestic travel-related costs: ~$1,200 per person
  
• Overseas travel-related costs: ~$1,600 per person
  
• Domestic accommodations (Sun→Fri): ~$2,200
  
• Overseas accommodations (Sun→Fri): ~$1,900
  

So yes: the overseas flight + auto rental was more expensive, but lodging was not—and the overall gap wasn’t as dramatic as I would have assumed before doing the work.

Step 5: The strategic move—make airfare worth it

One crucial change we made was extending the trip from one week to two. The logic was simple: if we’re paying for overseas flights and spending the travel time and effort (hello, jet lag), we might as well make the most of being there.

That decision changed the trip’s nature. It became a touring trip plus a ski trip, rather than a one-week sprint.

The take-away

First, whatever you estimate, count on spending 10% more—at least. I’m sure Albert Einstein derived a theorem proving that as immutable law. Second, doing the math—even in rough form—sometimes reveals that the implausible isn’t really beyond reach. Besides, it’s a great mental exercise to research, organize, and analyze.