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.

Is done and dusted.

It features lots of new places to eat and drink in the capital (assuming that they do not burn down between now and the time you read the guide), as well as a feature on skiing in Romania. This year has finally seen a fair bit of investment in the skiing infrastructure up at Sinaia and – especially – Poiana Brasov.

All we need now is some snow.

We also have a major feature on the Romanian Revolution of 1989, as well as the usual guide to just about everything worth knowing about Bucharest.

Anyway, here is the latest issue of Bucharest In Your Pocket in all its glory on Issuu:

As usual there is a PDF of the whole thing available here.

Those of you with an iPhone can download the Bucharest In Your Pocket app here.

You can read about the cover, which is also on the current Bucharest IYP Mini-Guide, here.

Our annual whinge about the state of Romania’s ski resorts. For last year’s, see here.

Bucharest Life – then known of course as Wimbledon Life – spent Christmas 1990 in Romania; in Sinaia, to be precise. In those days, skiing in proper resorts was still beyond the pocket of a junior civil servant, so we had to make do with what we could afford: Andorra, Bulgaria, Romania.

And in those days, Romania was bloody cheap. Even with the scourge of ‘foreigner price’ to deal with it was impossible to spend all that much. In fact, you had to be careful not to exchange too much money and end up with a load of useless paper which you couldn’t spend, because there was nothing to spend it on; nor in those days could you change lei back into real money. It wasn’t even soft enough to wipe your backside with.

Those were the days.

Back then, there was not even such a thing as a proper piste map in Sinaia, and in many ways it is heartwarming to know that 20 years on there is still no proper piste map. This utterly unhelpful map is all we have ever found:

A prehistoric piste map for a prehistoric ski resort

We have said in the past that the best place in Romania to develop a proper ski resort would be Balea Lac, high in the snow-sure Fagaras Mountains. The Valea Dorului at Sinaia is an option (as there is already something resembling a skiing infrastructure, snow is guaranteed and it is not too difficult to reach from Bucharest and its airports), but the issues which we picked up on in this post make any development there unlikely in the near future.

We did read last week that Petrosani/Parang would see development soon, complete with seven chairlifts and a whopping 30km of piste: that’s enough to keep a decent skier happy for at least a few hours. (That, of course, is if those 30km will actually be real kilometres. In our experience, a kilometre in a Romanian ski resort tends to be a little shorter than elsewhere).

Quite how people will get to Petrosani is another matter: it is hardly in the most accessible part of the country. Another concern would be that the highest part of the Parang ski area is 1699 metres: snow at that height is not guaranteed.

Anyway, these things are probably irrelevant: we have filed the project under ‘we’ll believe it when we see it.’

Until Petrosani/Parang becomes a worthwhile alternative, Romania’s ‘top ski resort’ (everything’s relative) will remain of course good old Poiana Brasov, a place which, pound for pound, offers less value for money than probably any ski resort in the world. Indeed, in our wholly unscientific survey (carried out yesterday afternoon on the back of an envelope) we have found it to be the most expensive place to ski in Europe.

A not entirely accurate piste map of Poiana Brasov

This coming season, a day’s lift pass in Poiana Brasov will cost 125 lei; that’s €30 for 13km of piste, or €2.30 per km. Bansko, in Bulgaria (Poiana’s biggest regional rival), offers 75km of piste for €25 (2009-2010 prices), or €0.34 per km. The Three Valleys in France offer 600km of piste for €47, or €0.08 per km.

Of course, maybe Poiana Brasov makes up for its lack of piste with other things, such as perfectly groomed, rock-free slopes and modern, high-speed lifts free of queues.

Or maybe not.

We really ought to try this, though something tells us we never will…

Poiana Brasov. Photo by CodGabriel@Flickr

We used to have a genuine soft-spot for Poiana Brasov, a legacy of a winter a decade or so ago when we would ski there every weekend. As soon as we’d finished work on a Friday we would head off for Brasov, eat at Taverna (then just about the only decent restaurant in the city); stay at the Postavarul (the cheapest sleep in town) and drive up to Poiana very early on Saturday morning, usually in time to get the first cable car up the mountain. That way you would usually be guaranteed at least a couple of hours or so of relatively queue-free skiing. By 11am however the queues would be of basic-foodstuffs-during-communism proportions, and the appeal of skiing in Poiana evaporated.

But we were back the next day, and the next weekend. We skied in Poiana not because is was particularly good, but because it beat the hell out of a winter weekend in Bucharest, and because well, it was there: not three hours away. It would almost have been rude not to go skiing.

The truth is, skiing in Poiana Brasov then was a fairly lousy experience. And while the resort itself – as we saw this weekend on a short research trip ahead of the publication of a new Brasov & Poiana Brasov In Your Pocket Mini-Guide – has never looked better, old problems remain.

Poiana Brasov. Photo by CodGabriel@Flickr

And how many kilometres of piste have been added to the measly 13 km Poiana Brasov had in 1990?

None.

The only investment in the skiing infrastructure has been the installation of a new gondola lift three winters ago. And while it has eased queuing a fair bit, it simply means more people sharing the same, very limited ski area.

Yet the biggest gripe we would have about Poiana right now are the prices.

Try looking for a hotel or apartment over Christmas or New Year. You will find nothing for less than €100 per night. All for 13 kilometres of piste.

There was a time when Poiana Brasov was cheap and cheerful. Now it must rank as one of the most exclusive ski resorts in the world: only the wealthy can afford to stay there.

As for us, we’re off to Bansko in Bulgaria, with a still modest but much more respectable 60 km of piste, and where paying for a week’s accommodation for a family of four will not hugely affect your financial standing for the rest of the month.