I am just at the end of my weeks holiday skiing with my two sons. We have had a great time in Cervinia – Italy.
Snow Cannon in Cervinia - an expensive toy!
It is not a cheap holiday by any means – mountain restaurants are notorious – £10 for three cans of coke is a bit excessive. They, of course argue that they have significant transport costs. No element of monopoly comes into play?
One of the most expensive elements of the holiday is the ‘lift pass’. Without one you go nowhere – and you are a fairly captive audience. This years adult pass for 6 days cost me £227 – nearly £38 per day. Each. Ouch.
We ate a few times in Lino’s (a great restaurant at the side of the piste which does superb pizza). I remember Lino’s from when I was last in Cervinia – depsite being in a Hotel with half board, I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in there one day – so bad was the Hotel food!
As we paid the bill for the pizza – we got talking to the owner about the resort. He was moaning about the costs in resort – I think he meant ‘business rates’, but some of the conversation got a little lost in translation. I moaned about the lift pass cost!
My son had asked me a few days earlier about the ‘piste bashers‘ – and what they cost. I thought they would be £200,000. In fact Lino said that the base model was 380,000 euros! They have 5 in the resort – which are manned on two eight hour shifts by 10 people. They run overnight…
Then there is the investment in snow cannons – which guarantee the snow conditions by ‘making’ snowflakes – forcing water and air at pressure through nozzles. I lost count of how many we saw!
The cost of fuel and electricity for piste bashers / snow cannons is colossal!
Then today as we used four lifts to climb to 10,000ft I realised the other staff involved – at both top and bottom of each lift were at least three staff, checking and clearing the areas.The lifts run from 8.30 – 4.30 every day.
Lino said that there had been investment of 80m euros in 5 years.
It is then that you realise that this investment needs to be clawed back – thats 350,000 lift passes… I won’t moan any more. Much.
January 21st, 2011 at 08:47
[...] But resorts of this nature can play with nature. In the form of Piste Bashers – which I blogged about before. These machines run all night – they look quite eerie on the slopes in the pitch black with [...]