We first highlighted the quite shocking cost of lift passes at Romanian ski resorts over a year ago, in a rant about the general state of skiing in the country.
Since then there has been improvement – infrastructure wise, at least. Besides the opening of the Arena Platos near Sibiu (more hereafter) new lifts and runs have been opened at both Sinaia and Poiana Brasov. We covered these improvements (and much else, including the fact that there are still many problems) in the feature on Romanian skiing we published in the December-January issue of Bucharest In Your Pocket. Read it here.
Bizarrely, a report at the weekend in German tabloid Bild listed Predeal and Poiana Brasov amongst the cheapest resorts in Europe. As we have long insisted, they are no such thing.
The Bild report used hotel prices as main reason for claiming skiing in Romania was cheap. This is misleading. In every resort in the world (including Courchevel, Verbier and Gstaad) you can find a cheap sleep if you try hard enough. Likewise, you can find very expensive hotel rooms in Predeal and Poiana Brasov (and you don’t even have to try particularly hard).
We think that when it comes to ranking ski resorts by price, the only formula worth any salt is our idea of taking the cost of a day’s lift pass and dividing it by the amount of skiing available.
So this morning we did just that, taking the main Romanian resorts, and comparing their prices with a handful of the world’s best – and usually thought of as the most expensive – ski resorts, from all over the planet. Prices are for one day, for an adult, midweek in January (June in the case of Portillo). All amounts converted to Euros:
Azuga €32/12km = €2.66 per km
Busteni €57/2km = €28.50 per km
Poiana Brasov €27/23km = €1.17 per km
Predeal €22/10km = €2.20 per km
Sinaia €62/40km = €1.55 per km
Note: Poiana Brasov – which has not increased lift pass prices despite adding two new chairlifts this year and almost doubling the amount of pistes – now in fact offers by far the best value skiing in Romania.
Are €43/98km = €0.43 per km
Courchevel/Three Valleys €49.10/600km = €0.08 per km
Portillo €38/45km = €0.84 per km
Verbier €56/410km = €0.14 per km
Winterpark €49/230km = €0.21 per km
Conclusion? Skiing in Romania does not generally offer what we could even begin to term ‘good value’.
Apropos of all this, we spent a couple of days last week in what could well be the world’s smallest ski resort, the Arena Platos at Paltinis, near Sibiu. We didn’t ski, as it hardly seemed worthwhile. Buckling up our boots would have taken longer than skiing down any of the short slopes. We would guess that the total length of the five pistes here is less than two kilometres.
Arena Platos, Paltinis
That said, however, everything about the set-up at Arena Plato is highly impressive.
There are as many drag lifts as there are pistes (keeping queues to a minimum), people not skiing or snowboarding are forbidden from entering the ski area (we can’t be the only people who have many times had to dodge tarts in high-heels walking across the pistes at Poiana Brasov?) the slopes are all floodlit and open until 10pm, there is a car park right at the bottom of the slopes and while the price of a day’s lift pass would be high when the euro per kilometre formula (see above) is applied, skiing here is, all-in-all, a cheap day out (lift pass and ski hire cost less than 100 lei).
If the same people administered Romania’s other ski resorts they might not be in the (generally) sorry state they are.
Tagged as:
Arena Platos Paltinis,
Azuga,
Busteni,
Cheapest Ski Resorts,
Kalinderu Busteni,
Most Expensive Ski Resorts,
Paltinis,
Poiana Brasov,
Poiana Brasov Snow Report,
Predeal,
Sinaia,
Ski Romania,
Skiing in Poiana Brasov,
Skiing in Romania,
Skiing Poiana Brasov
