J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by AllyG

The carre (it has an acute on the 'e') neige insurance is very cheap. I think it's about 3 euros per day, purchased with the lift pass in France. Or you can buy the seasonal one, called carte neige, and it's about 50 euros (it's on sale now at Tignes).

If this was compulsory we would at least get rescued and taken to hospital. In the EU most of the medical expenses should be paid for us, as EU citizens, anyway, as long as we have our EHIC cards with us.

I was wondering why the resorts don't do this, and I wondered if it's against EU competition laws or something, as in you wouldn't get to choose your rescue insurer, so the Carre Neige people would have a monopoly on it.

Edit
Sorry, Snowcrazy, you beat me to it :D

Ally

Dids,
That's terrible news :cry:

I hope you have a stroke of luck and manage to find some cash for a ski holiday :D

Ally

I realize it's going slightly 'off-piste' but while we're all reading the small print on our insurance policies there's something else I'd like to point out.

They are also tightening up on what they consider to be 'pre-existing conditions'. I was enquiring about travel insurance from the NFU for a relative, and they said that because she's on statins from her GP they would consider her to have a heart condition and therefore they wouldn't cover her for this, although in fact her heart is fine and she's only on statins because the doctor thought it would be a good idea considering her age.

The NFU said that if you are taking prescribed medication then they consider you are suffering from whatever the medication is normally prescribed for and hence won't insure you for it.

So, in this case, I would think if you were off piste with a whole gang of you all equipped with shovels and what-not and you were on statins and you had a heart attack you wouldn't be covered.

However, this advice was verbal, and I haven't had it in writing from the underwriters or anything, so it may not be true, but I did find it very worrying.

Some insurers, like Saga, will give cover for notified pre-existing conditions, but they are a lot more expensive.

Maybe the ski resorts should introduce compulsory rescue insurance (including for off-piste) and add it to the price of the lift pass, so that we all know we're covered. As I said before, I buy the Carre Neige insurance anyway in France to top up my British travel insurance. I don't know if there is a similar insurance scheme in the other ski countries.

Ally

Ian,
Maybe you weren't looking out of the window at the time?

snowcrazy2005 wrote:Ally, first may I thaank you for finding those links, whilst I did thank someone else for finding them I did not use your name as I did not know if you would want me to on another forum. But thanks again, they had some very interesting stuff.

Snowcrazy, those are SwingBeep's links, not mine. I hardly know anything about going off-piste, or avalanche warnings, whereas clearly SwingBeep knows a great deal about it and has been kind enough to post some of his knowledge up for the rest of us to share.

Ally

Thanks very much for all that SwingBeep :D

I don't know if it would work or not, but maybe what they ought to do, in the larger resorts, is to make different types of pistes to suit the different types of skiers/boarders.

They do seem to be doing this already to a certain extent. I have seen pistes dedicated to beginners and those going slowly, with a speed limit on them. And I believe some of the resorts now have one or two ungroomed pistes. Perhaps they could have some off-piste areas which are actually reasonably safe from avalanche - the marked trail type of thing - but patrolled and checked for safety.

They also seem to have started on free avalanche training - looking for survivors etc. They do it at Courchevel for example. and I was thinking about doing it last year.

Ally

Nelly,
Take no notice. I don't think it's you, I think it's Innsbruck.

When we were landing there once, the pilot said they all like landing there because it's one of the few places where they're allowed to manually take over control of the plane themselves and land, because the approach is so difficult (it's like landing in a couloir for those that haven't done it). I don't know if he was joking or not, he did seem to be in a jolly mood as he also told us he was racing the Monarch pilot to Innsbruck (we went with Airtours - it was ages ago).

And then, when we were coming back, we got stuck on the tarmac at Innsbruck for ages in one of those special buses. It was pretty alarming at the time because there wasn't enough room to sit down and people got exhausted standing. And then we saw a load of ambulances going out the airfield gate, before they let us on the plane. I still don't know what it was all about.

A friend of ours flew to Innsbruck last winter, and apparently the pilot realized at the last minute that he couldn't make the landing and turned around to have another go, and really frightened our friend's daughter. It made her quite nervous about flying again.

Coop - that sounds like a really dreadful journey. I hope you got some compensation for it.

Ally

I agree Ian, getting older means an increasing number of these sort of things. Luckily for me, my worst two injuries have been to my arms, not my legs (one arm on the dry ski slope and the other moving a large flower pot) and my legs are not affected. I broke my big toe last year on the moguls but it seems to be fine now.

It sounds as though Tony_H has one of these war wounds now in his knee.
Tony - are you going to wear a knee brace ski-ing, or do you reckon you can fix it with physio etc.?

I was watching the film 'Going for the Gold' last night, about Bill Johnson getting the first alpine sports Gold Medal for the U.S. in downhill racing in 1984. The ski-ing bits are really great to watch, and they've very cleverly stitched in real footage of the Olympics (or at least I reckon it's real).

I looked him up afterwards and Wikipedia says he never did very well again because he injured his kneee and his back, but he had another go at a medal and nearly killed himself and is now permanently brain damaged. Thinking about this made me realize that a slightly dodgy arm is not really that bad.

Ally