With snow blanketing ski resorts in Europe, Asia and North America, the Northern Hemisphere winter season is in full swing. And if your social media feed is like ours, plenty of Aussies have already headed to popular snow spots to carve up the pow-pow. But what are the peak destinations for shredders and skiers?
Compare the Market AU crunched the data and ranked the 50 top ski destinations according to accommodation options, ski runs by difficulty, average annual snowfall and the average cost of an adult ski pass.
Unsurprisingly, Japan tops the list of top ski destinations for a snowsports holiday.
For Aussies, the proximity, consistent powder, snow monkeys and alluring culture see many visitors bookend their trip in one of the country’s exciting cities plus there’s plenty to do off the slopes, too.
Hakuba ranked number one among the top ski destinations with a score of 8.91/10 for its high amount of accommodation options, snowfall (annual average of 11m) and the second-cheapest ski pass.
Coming in second among the world’s top ski destinations, Grenoble in France scored 8.23/10 due to its high number of ski runs (1,000km-plus) and the cheapest ski pass.
Five of the top-10 results were in the French Alps – Morzine (3), Tignes (5), Val-d’Isere (6) and Megeve ((8) along with other European destinations such as St Anton am Arlberg (4) and Saalbach (7) in Austria and Zermatt (10) in Switzerland.
Aside from Hakuba, the only other non-European location in the top 10 was the Canadian town of Banff, coming in at ninth place.
But it’s not all good news for the Aussie & US top ski destinations…
The data showed US and Australian locations were the most expensive for ski passes despite having very low total lengths of ski runs in comparison to other locations.
While US locations have decent snowfall, most have very low ski run totals and lower numbers of accommodation options.
The first US entry on the top 50 list comes in at number 11 for Anchorage, Alaska followed by Aspen at 12, while Australia’s top option is Perisher at 39.
In Australia, low accommodation options combined with expensive ski passes, low ski run lengths and some of the lowest average annual snowfall make it an expensive choice for beginners.
NZ ski destinations fare a bit better with Queenstown and Wanaka at number 26 and 29 respectively.
Check out the full list here.
