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Finding cheap flights to ski resorts

Monday, 11. 15. 2010  –  Category: Snowboarding

Updating this old post with a little more info.

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, annoyingly.

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 zugu, which is a relatively new site from the people who run Cheapflights.co.uk. zugu is a meta search site with near enough real-time flight data for most of the major airlines flying across Europe. So far for the season I’ve found and booked flights with Airberlin and easyJet for 2 different trips with the zugu site.

One of the top features if being able to be very precise about flight times, which is important to me when trying to maximise time on the slopes and minimise the number of days holiday allowance I need to take off work.

Transfers and accommodation

Again, zugu does a job here with car hire comparison and a hotels section. That said, many European airports have great train connections to ski resorts, especially it seems in Austria. Getting a train through the Alps can give you access to some spectacular scenery and take the effort out.

In addition to using comparison sites, I’ve found some of the best deals on hotels by going direct to the official resort website and following links to local hotels. The Cervinia site has been good to me many times in this respect.

Tags: Ski travel