Look to Italy he said for the best bargains and flights from Birmingham and Manchester
Look to Italy, he said, for the best bargains, and flights from Birmingham and Manchester. (He wasn't kidding: Thomson has a basic, self-catering week in the Italian Alps priced at only pounds 189, flying from Manchester.)Mr Simkins is keeping a close eye on the market now, because his company is developing its own late-booking website I had a preview of it, and was very impressed. Going through them (I read 88 last weekend) is a slow, laborious process; and because the tour operators provide such limited information on their own pages, it takes detective work to identify the holidays and thus calculate the discount on the brochure prices.Having done my consumer research on Teletext for next weekend's departures (finding an average discount of 33 per cent), I rang Ian Simkins, ski manager at Thomson, for an expert view. But the most comprehensive source of late-booking bargains is the Teletext pages. I have used these and other sources for the survey of Europe's ski areas, below.Finding the best bargains is not so straightforward. Some websites provide a booking service; the wide-ranging Complete Skier site, for example, links a late-availability list from Ski Solutions with an abbreviated version of Ski Hotline's snow reports, and 1Ski offers a similar package. What Ski Hotline does is to seek to corroborate such information via a network of 20-odd reporters in the Alps and by consulting local reps from those operators to which Ski Hotline supplies snow reports, Crystal and Neilson among them.
Despite their different retrieval methods, however, the two websites are fairly consistent in their assessments of snow cover in the individual ski resorts. Traditionally, snow reports come from resort tourist offices, which have no incentive to understate local cover. According to Paul Wisely, who runs the Ski Hotline site, "Some of them give reliable information, but there are others who will spin you a yarn."The Ski Club uses its own resort contacts to supply the data - although local knowledge about snow cover can still normally be traced back to the resort management. Ski Hotline offers more detail on snow conditions and weather, plus a link to extensive "profiles" of the more popular resorts; the Ski Club site is less encyclopaedic, but includes a feature of particular appeal to snow-seekers, namely an index of those resorts with the best conditions, judged by the depth of snow on the upper slopes, the amount of powder, and the greatest snowfall in the previous week.Just how reliable this information is depends, of course, on its sources. Both offer information, regularly updated (in theory, if not always in practice, on a daily basis), on conditions in resorts - 180 of them on Ski Hotline's site, 200 on the Ski Club's. Wouldn't you prefer to know the conditions in a resort before booking a holiday there? The increasingly comprehensive snow-report sites on the Internet make that possible.
And electronic technology makes finding ski holiday bargains that much easier.The best of the snow-report websites are those provided by Ski Hotline and the Ski Club of Great Britain. For others, the argument for late booking has grown stronger in the last two years. This season overall capacity seems likely to exceed demand by 10 per cent, unless the recent snowfalls stimulate better-than-usual late bookings. Cutting prices eats away at already paper-thin margins; but the operators' fixed costs (charter flights, accommodation and coach transfers to which they are committed in advance) mean that any income will improve their profit-and-loss balance.For those skiers who travel in groups, want specific resort accommodation, or are restricted to peak-period trips by school holidays (don't look for bargains this week: it's half-term), booking early is essential. Since no operator wants to find itself in a position where it could sell more holidays if only it had more capacity, the tendency is to err on the generous side.
