helping family

I am hopeing someone can resolve an issue i had today.I went to the chill factore today to get a little practice in for my canada ski holiday in december. When we got there and booked ourselves in for 3 hours of skiing but as my wife not the most confident of skiers we decided to have a quick practice linking turns and stopping etc before going on the drag lift to top of the hill in the interest of safety. We were then informed that only people in ski school were allowed to use the nursery slope so she had to practice this at the bottom of the main slope which was no problem. As things went well and she felt confident about her technique we went to the top of the hill and skied down with no problems but at the bottom we got talking about technique and i started to demonstrate the way i do a snowplough and she copied,then next thing we knew a member of staff was rushing over to us shouting STOP STOP!. She said i was not allowed to teach as i am not a qualified instructor which is fair enough however when you are trying to make someones life slightly easier by showing them a more effective way of doing something i dont strictly speaking think this qualifies as teaching as she has skied before and was just brushing up a little. After i tried to put this point across although she never actually said so she seemed to be implying i was breaking the law by 'teaching'. I was wondering whether this is the case or have i miss understood and just been caught out by some manic member of staff determined to uphold the company rules of the chill factore?

Based on what I've read elsewhere from ski instructors, I gather it's not the done thing to teach on the slopes unless you're a local instructor. Maybe it's skiing law or some sort of code of conduct etiquette agreement in the skiing profession to protect and not encroach on each others place of work.

Job's worth is alive, well and living in Manchester. That person or the whole staff need to get a life. What a load of @$^*.

I can see it would be "theft of service" if a professional instructor were to teach unofficially at a place where instruction is offered. However among family and even friends there is no theft as no payment is charged.

I have been helped by others and helped other people at dozens of places and never have I heard of a problem. I have heard of some threats made where a charge was to be made for the service. In future, you might say " we are just discussing technique. no instruction is taking place".

Trencher

Lame I'm sorry that's just lame. You want to know where I learned to carve? A random guy that was with his family helped me ski (ski for the first time since my accident). I get most of my help from other skiiers. I'm a social butterfly. The fact that you couldn't help some one out is a load of crap. I can understand it may be a liability issue but come on. Helping people should NEVER be a bad thing *grabs kitty and goes to sleep* G' 8) Night all

To my knowledge, all of the UK indoor snow facilities and plastic slopes do not allow teaching/coaching/instruction by members of the public. All of the sites employ BASI/ASSI qualified teaching staff. I can imagine that H&S Regs and their insurers require them to run a tight ship, and avoid the inevitable litigation and probable on slope carnage that an open policy would risk.
Coincidentally, I have heard that the teaching staff are on rather a low wage, which is in stark contrast to the tuition rates which are :shock:

Yes, you probably lucked out with an overly keen member of staff, or they have had recent problems and have tightened up.

bandit wrote:To my knowledge, all of the UK indoor snow facilities and plastic slopes do not allow teaching/coaching/instruction by members of the public. All of the sites employ BASI/ASSI qualified teaching staff. I can imagine that H&S Regs and their insurers require them to run a tight ship, and avoid the inevitable litigation and probable on slope carnage that an open policy would risk.
Coincidentally, I have heard that the teaching staff are on rather a low wage, which is in stark contrast to the tuition rates which are :shock:

Yes, you probably lucked out with an overly keen member of staff, or they have had recent problems and have tightened up.

That's perfectly correct, I looked into this myself recently in fact. It's an indoor sports facility and governed by much the same rules as gyms or swimming pools for example. There's no comparison at all with pistes on real outdoor slopes.

Giving someone a few tips is perfectly reasonable, teaching someone to snowplough very clearly isn't. In fact, Jay was lucky not to be thrown out altogether as he/she had ignored the booking conditions and made an inaccurate statement when booking. Beginners aren't allowed on the (indoor) slopes without instructors and someone who can't snow plough is a beginner. If nothing else it should be perfectly obvious that someone doing snowplough lessons on the main slope is a hazard for everyone else.

Interesting!

Does this mean that those of us with instructor qualifications still cant teach our own family there then? If i was teaching my sister/mum and someone came over and told me that i'd be kinda annoyed, as i an actually teach them. I can understand that they want the only teaching on the slope to be theirs and of their own standard, however good it may be. But dont see why they take someone else doing it, as a basic level of snowplough, so seriously!

bennyboy wrote:Interesting!

Does this mean that those of us with instructor qualifications still cant teach our own family there then? If i was teaching my sister/mum and someone came over and told me that i'd be kinda annoyed, as i an actually teach them. I can understand that they want the only teaching on the slope to be theirs and of their own standard, however good it may be. But dont see why they take someone else doing it, as a basic level of snowplough, so seriously!

Yes it does seem to. It was bandit that mentioned this to me a few weeks back when I mentioned I was going to take my niece to an indoor slope when I was in the UK. I'd expected I could teach her and that was a non-starter. In the end we went to "Go Ape" which was way more fun )

I think you're getting it backwards though, it's not more acceptable because it's just a snow plough, I think it's probably less acceptable. Giving someone feedback on their carving must be just fine, doing a follow me demo of a snowplough is disruptive. One of the reasons they're trying to keep beginners off the main slope is to allow the more accomplished skiers to get a good run and not need to weave around "follow me" teaching.