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.

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.