How we rank
The Snow Value Index
Every resort gets a score out of 100 and an indicative cost for one person, for one week, leaving from your city. The index is the first divided by the second: score per 100 of trip cost. A high number means the skiing is good and getting to it is cheap.
Most of the score is snow, but not all of it — roughly a quarter is how much skiing there is, on a log scale, so that the step from 30 km to 100 km counts for far more than the step from 400 km to 600 km. Without that, the index just rewards whichever small, high, cold resort has the best snow record, and ranks a six-lift Arctic hill above the Trois Vallées. That is not a holiday anyone is shopping for.
The cost includes seven nights sharing, a six-day lift pass, six days of ski hire, and return travel — flights, ski carriage and airport transfer, or fuel and tolls split across a car of four, whichever is cheaper from where you are. Travel cost is calculated from your departure city rather than assumed, which is why the ranking is different for London and for Stockholm.
Two modes, and why
Between roughly December and April the snow score is live: modelled snowfall over the next seven days, settled depth at mid-mountain, and how many of those days stay below freezing.
Outside those months there is no snow on the models anywhere, and a live ranking would be fifty resorts tied at zero. So the score switches to snow reliability instead — altitude adjusted for latitude, plus glacier cover. A degree of latitude is worth roughly 100 metres of altitude in snow terms, which is why Levi holds snow at 200 metres and Bansko struggles at 990.
The mode is always stated at the top of the ranking. We will not show you a reliability ranking dressed up as live conditions.
Why we never take your booking
Snowvantage is a comparison and editorial site. Every booking happens on the operator's own site, under their contract, and we never pass your name, email or payment details to anyone.
That is a deliberate design decision, not an oversight. Under the EU Package Travel Directive, sending a traveller from one booked service straight into a second one — a transfer, ski hire, a lift pass — within 24 hours creates what the law calls a linked travel arrangement, and makes the site that facilitated it liable for a regulated travel guarantee. Sites that quietly cross that line are taking on obligations their readers assume have been met.
So transfers and hire are listed as independent suppliers, on their own, never as the next step in a flow we started. It costs us conversion. It keeps the site honest about what it is.
What the numbers are not
Costs are planning estimates, not quotes, and they will not match what you eventually pay. Snow figures come from weather models, not from resort snow reports — models are honest but they are not measurements. Piste kilometres and lift counts are compiled from public sources and are marked as unverified until we have checked them against the resort's own published figures.
Snow data is from Open-Meteo, refreshed every six hours.