Ski resorts exaggerating piste lengths

SwingBeep wrote:Christoph Schrahe, a German cartographer has measured the length of the pistes along the fall line down the middle of the pistes in 80 ski resorts and found that in many cases they are considerably shorter than the lengths given on the piste maps.

When asked to comment Reinhard Klier the CEO of the Stubaier Gletscher ski area said that they gave the length of the pistes not as the length along the fall line, but as the length of a line that arcs from one edge of the piste to the other, which they calculated by multiplying the fall line length by Pi/2 (1.7) in order to simulate the actual route taken by a skier. He also said that they measured pistes wider than 100m twice!

The table below was assembled from Austrian, German and Swiss press reports. It would appear that each ski area has its own system of measurement.



Ski areas that do not follow this practice and give the length of their pistes as the fall line length include: St Anton, Lech and Zurs, Kitzbühel, Saalbach-Hinterglem, Espace Diamant, Sierra Nevada and Parnassos in Greece.

To be honest, if you're straight lining it down the mountain, you're not skiing properly any way, so what does it matter? If you're carving proper turns actually attempting to get the most out of your skiing and the mountain then it your putting more Km's on your route... Pinch of salt needed I think

If you've never been to a particular resort the size is something most of us consider along with other things.

A few percent out is fair enough on a large resort. On a small resort a good skier may well find they've ski'd it out in a day or two.

For some skiing the same run time and time again to perfect their technique may well be sufficient to keep them happy. For me to justify a couple of hundred Euros I like a bit of variety and to see different sights on my weeks holiday. Some pistes are so nice I will gladly ski them several times in my week's holiday, some I'll ski several times because it's the route home.
Would I spend a week of my holiday at a Snowdome? No and for the same reason I wouldn't go to a tiny resort.
For most skiers it's a recreation - we are too old to be the next Franz Klammer an to consider it a sport is delusional. I jog but don't call it sport - I don't race. I swim but don't compete (any more) so it's recreation/fitness. So the facilities I do my skiing in matter.

In the end if you buy a dozen tennis balls and find there are only 8 in the packet you would feel ripped off. What's the difference with piste lengths?

If the % difference were the same, it wouldn't matter. It also means they aren't all using a standard calculation, and a lot of creativity instead.
It does matter because it's one of the major factors in ski resort 'hierarchy' and what many base their choice of holiday on. It's basic deceit, it's the main tag line for most resorts, what they sell themselves on.

I find this disturbing. When I am considering a resort I haven't been to before, the claimed amount of pistes is a key factor in my decision. Now I find that some areas are exaggerating wildly in the absence of a common standard :evil: :evil: :evil: .

At a minimum, they should be required to disclose the form of measurement being used. I would have thought most countries would have consumer protection legislation that would deal with this sort of nonsense :roll: .

Thankfully, the resource that J2ski is enables us to get real information on places we haven't been to rather than having to rely on tour operator brochures or tourist office spurious claims :wink: .

I first read this in January on Blick. Some of the resort list is different but the main ones are there.
Also in January, I had a reason to try and obtain as accurate run distance as possible for a couple of runs.
I quickly discounted any app info ~ some of these were giving distances shorter than the length of the lift!
I used the lift length + cartographical info + 15% turn/route variation. There was no specified run length for comparison, but the result pretty well agreed with what I would have expected from normal speeds.
I don't think we can accuse the Bergbahns of being deceitful. If there is no standard common measurement, then the resorts are free to choose the most advantageous method.
What about when three runs have different start points, join into one, then split into two routes home? It is easy to see how operators can arrive at different methodologies.
We see the same differences in snow depth depiction, both as stated/experienced, and in resort variations.

I have never been convinced, either, by the American use of "enclosed acreage". As a guess most skiers would not be using muchof the off piste acreage. Of those that do, I am less convinced that they would be using a significant percentage. Hence, that method is suspect, too.
Perhaps a more acceptable method would be an acreage measurement of piste area, and maybe an indicator of the off piste cover. I understand there will be some areas that are off piste dominant, but this will identify the area correctly.

I think you are right Dave - lengths for piste is clear enough - acreage should only be used for the off piste element that is open to skiing.

Dave Mac wrote: I don't think we can accuse the Bergbahns of being deceitful. If there is no standard common measurement, then the resorts are free to choose the most advantageous method.

There must be thousands of pages of guidelines, regulations, and standards that apply to the operation of ski areas, but strangely there is nothing that specifies how pistes should be measured. In the absence of any clearly defined method I think that the only fair way to measure the length of a piste is down the fall line, we buy cloth by the running metre not by the zig zag metre.

It's not as if the ski areas don't have the information to hand, for several years now they have been using GPS and radar systems to manage the depth of snow on their pistes, for these systems to work properly they have to accurately map (to plus/minus 10cm) the terrain on which the pistes are built in 3D, during the summer. A computer displays all the necessary information required for optimal grooming in the drivers cab.



Verbier, reportedly one of the worst offenders uses what is probably the most accurate system, a combined GPS and radar system from Geosnow http://www.geosnow.ch/upload/editor/pdf/Geosnow_GB.pdf and Alpbach uses a system from PowerGIS http://www.pistenmanagement.at/images/stories/arena_images/pistenmanagement_folder_en_2011_screen.pdf

With all this information and the results of studies that the various cableway operators associations have carried out which show that kilometers of piste is a decisive factor for many skiers when choosing where to go on holiday. I think that there is more than a bit of exaggeration going on here. In Austria the public prosecutor responsible for corruption has been asked to conduct an investigation to see if there are grounds to bring a prosecution for fraud and in Switzerland the Foundation for Consumer Protection has said that if this is true then it amounts to unfair competition.

I understand that there is a lot of available data. What would concern me, is how one could sensibly apply that data.

Piste shapes/slopes/fall lines vary hugely. It would be possible to stand in one spot on the piste, and see two or three fall lines radiating out from that point.

Like me, I am sure you have been on pistes that are steep, tight, and only one skier wide.
Equally, we have all skied on wide open pistes, where twenty skiers can comfortably ski side by side.
Are these two conditions equitable?
We have skied on pistes where the left hand side is a totally different run from the right hand side ~ such a condition exists in Niederau, where there is a line on one run called "Mel's run" and one on the other, called "Mac's run"
On the Skiwelt there are areas with wide pistes that are split into three runs by a narrow band of trees. I have experienced exactly the same in the Coffee glade runs in Vale.
There is also my previous point about shared pistes ~ what counts as a run?
Hence my proposal that pistes should be measured in acreages, (Andymol misread the point)
Also, I would like to add in this point. We have all been in resorts where the blue runs are created by a grader as a virtually flat road width run. There is a case for some of these, but it is an easy way to add km to a resort. These are needed as roads for farms in the summer anyway, so what once was a farm track is just doubled in width. Voila! No GPS fall line issues here! Loads of "creative" km marketing though.