Hitting Kickers

Getting enough snowboarding in in a season is down to a few factors:

1. Getting your mates up for it.
2. Having the necessary funds.
3. Getting time off work.

If 1 is a problem, you can always get some new friends or go on your own. I’m wrestling with my conscience about this one at the moment as all my lot are either doing other things or are injured, anoyingly.

With careful planning and not wasting holiday in the summer, time off work needn’t be a problem. To make things easier I’ve just jacked my job in and am going self-employed. So long as this doesn’t make point 2 more of a problem, I should be laughing.

But to go snowboarding from the UK into Europe a good number of times over the winter period you’ll want to hunt around for some good deals. Here’s how I do it:

Researching ski resorts and nearby airports

You’ll probably be wanting to be getting a flight with a budget airline like easyJet or Ryan Air, both of which fly to a number of areas with nearby ski resorts.

I start by going to J2SKI.com, which lists all the major ski airports in Europe. From there, I cross reference with easyJet and Ryan Air which ski airports they fly to. For example, easyJet fly to Geneva.

From there I’ll check the Geneva page on J2SKI to see what resorts are within easy reach of the airport. The closer the resort, the cheaper the transfer and the sooner you’re strapping into your bindings and hitting the slopes.

Looking for cheap flights

My favourite site for comparing flights and finding deals at the moment is Sky Scanner.

From their homepage I can select that I want to fly from any airport in London to Geneva, and it tells me straight away they will show me the prices for easyJet flights and also that BA Connect, First Choice, British Airways, SWISS all fly there too, so I can check those separately if need be.

Sky Scanner show you a range of flights on and around the days you wish to travel.

To be honest, I’ve always found sites like Cheapflights.co.uk to be a waste of time. Lastminute.com is useful for finding out who flies to your destination, but you often get better deals direct from the airline websites.

Transfers and accommodation

Well, that’s all to come in a future post, not to mention your snowboard holiday insurance. I’m off to find one last flight this season.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Ski travel. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.