Living in the wonderful warm climate of South Africa, snow is not something we see very often. Only the mountain tops receive some snow in winter, and since it melts within a couple of days, skiing resorts before the 1990s were unheard of.
This, and a skiing vacation in Europe, would also have the added benefit of… well….BEING IN EUROPE(!) was, therefore, always a dream for us. However, the seemingly high cost of skiing clothing & gear, ski passes, and accommodation, not to mention the omnipresent cost of airline tickets, were always deterring factors.
Until the day my brother said they were going skiing near Munich, Germany.
Don’t just think something is unaffordable; make your dreams achievable.
We then started investigating this as an option, and since we wanted to include our kids in any skiing experience – which would mean 5x the expense – we did not think it would be affordable.
As mentioned in our previous post – Booking your flight – we started by looking for cheap airline tickets to Munich or a nearby destination and found cheap ones to Milan, Italy, through Emirates Airlines.
We did rough calculations and inquiries into accommodation and ski-lift costs and decided to bite the bullet. [We said we would make a plan for skiing clothing (x5!!) later since how expensive could it be, right?]
Initially, we had considered renting a car in Italy and driving to Munich. Still, we will cover certain factors in a future chapter – International Car Hire for dummies – which made us consider high-speed train travel. This, in turn, made us play around with routes to include Venice for a couple of days since we had heard that Venice in Winter is very special, and we ended up getting special fares. Almost in the same way, airlines offer cheap seats, which were only offered for an hour on the railway site. So we spent 2 days in Venice first before traveling to Munich, where we picked up our rental car to travel to the ski resort in the Bavarian Alps – Oberaudorf. The Hocheck ski resort at Oberaudorf also offers night skiing under floodlights, which we consider a bonus since you have to consider making the most of every minute while traveling.
The accommodation was also found at a very reasonable price. An accommodation site that we find very user-friendly and trustworthy and use very often is Booking.com. However, in this specific instance, we also searched directly for accommodation on individual hotel and apartment sites. This direct interaction with the proprietors resulted in us obtaining a very comfortable, well-equipped three-bedroomed apartment, with free wifi, in the town of Oberaudorf, for a week, for the price of only 600 Euro.
Now, what about the cost of the ski lifts? Every ski resort offers certain packages – such as a 3, 4, 5, and 6-day ski pass- which become cheaper per day if you purchase a ski pass for more days. They also have reduced fees for children, youths (and seniors), and family packages. So, taking the entire family for a week-long skiing holiday was not 5x the cost we had always imagined! Renting the skis, snowboards, etc., was also a quick and easy process and not as expensive as we had thought: the rental prices, along with the ski lift prices, are indicated on the ski resort’s website for advance budgeting. Ski lessons are also offered (and advisable for people who do not know snow.)
You only sometimes need to pack what you may need.
But what about our biggest concern: The skiing clothing we would need to buy only to use once? As you may imagine, shops offering skiing pants and jackets are a few because of the absence of ski resorts in our home country. They are also VERY expensive. Therefore, we considered purchasing second-hand ski clothing from other people who had also only gone skiing once and bought these expensive items. We, however, found that it took a lot of work to find available second-hand clothing of the correct size, and even the second-hand prices remained ridiculous. So, we thought, what would the price of skiing clothing be in Europe? And what a pleasant surprise: we searched the websites of some of the cheaper chain stores, such as KIK, and found what we needed at ridiculously low prices compared to what was available back home. So we decided to purchase all our
requirements in Munich when we collect the car. The only thing we needed to ensure was available packing space in our luggage for our return journey for these additional purchases. So we purchased ski pants for as little as 10 euros and jackets for 20 euros.
This again shows that a little research can save you a lot of money.
Happy Holidays!
