Our 2012 Resort Price Survey

How much was your beer this winter?

For the last three seasons, with the help of readers we have carried out huge price surveys of all the major resorts in Europe and North America – asking you to send us your food and drink costs. We have also expanded those prices to include lift passes, tuition and rental equipment for 2012 – producing an overall cost and RPI for each resort chapter in the book.

We are doing it again in 2012, and we are accepting your food and drink price information in two main ways.

You can submit prices via our new easy-to-use online form, which we would prefer; or you can send us an email. A neat way to capture prices swiftly is to photograph the menu (maybe with your phone); then you can stuff the prices into our system when you have internet access. An alternative is to send us the image, but that would need to be by email.

PRICES BY ONLINE FORM

We have a structured online form, incorporated into our new reporting system for 2011/12. This is our preferred way of filing prices, because it encourages you to give the right kind of information and organises it in a way that is easier for us to analyse. You can file prices at the same time as filing a resort report.

The system is designed to allow you to submit as little or as much information as you wish, and you can skip to the relevant parts or return to the home screen as necessary.

PRICE SURVEY FORM

IMPORTANT NOTE – TIME OUT ISSUE

Our database server is set to time out (ie disconnect you) if you have not hit an on-screen button for a while. Theoretically, that timeout occurs after 30 minutes, but don’t depend on it.

So it’s best to sit down to file your report when you are not expecting any interruptions. Make your coffee (or trip to the loo) before you start.

OR

PRICES BY EMAIL

We’re happy to take prices by email. It’s important that you send us stuff that fits neatly into the survey as a whole, so we’ve prepared some notes for your guidance here:

In brief

Send email to: prices@wtss.co.uk

Give resort name and restaurant name

Put each price on a new line

Or send images of menus, plus resort and restaurant name.

Further detail

You can give us prices typical of the resort rather than specific prices from a named restaurant.

For each price, you need to define the dish or drink precisely enough for us to make valid comparisons with other resorts.

For drinks, specify size as well as type. Try to give the actual volume such as ‘25cl’ or ‘50cl’. Fall back on ‘large’ and ‘small’ if you have to.

For meals, you need to put the dish into one of our standard categories and then give some sort of description. The categories are:

• soup
• starter
• main cheap (which typically means pizza and pasta dishes, or burgers)
• main plain (which means straightforward things like entrecote and chips)
• main fancy (which might be something like magret de canard au poivre vert)
• dessert