Our 2014 Resort Prices Survey

What did you pay for beer this winter?

Every year since our 2010 edition, with the help of readers we have carried out huge price surveys of all the major resorts in Europe and North America. We started with food and drink costs, but then added in the costs of lift passes, tuition and rental equipment – producing an overall cost and Resort Price Index for each resort chapter in the book.

We are doing all this again in 2014 for the 2015 edition, and we again need your help in gathering food and drink price information.

You can submit prices via our online database 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.

To be useful to us this year, prices need to be in by the end of April.

What we want

Our elaborate system for comparing the level of prices in different resorts can make use of more or less any price information you care to gather. But the most useful items are those that we put into the ‘basket’ of costs that we include in the budget panels at the start of our resort chapters. They are:

cheap main dish – pasta, pizza, burger/chips, sausage/chips
mid-range main dish – e.g. entrecôte/chips, plat du jour
25cl house wine
small beer
coke
large coffee/cappucino

If you want to gather just a few prices, these are the ones to focus on.

Option 1: our online prices database

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. Note that this system is quite separate from that used for resort reports.

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. Go to the link below.

Online prices database

Option 2: send 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@wheretoskiandsnowboard.com

Give resort name and restaurant name

Put each item/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. We’re mainly interested in beer, cheap wine, coke and coffee.

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 dish cheap (which typically means pizza and pasta dishes, or burger/sausage and chips)
• main dish plain (which means straightforward things like entrecote and chips)
• plat du jour (in France)
• main dish fancy (which might be something like magret de canard au poivre vert)
• dessert