Where to go -10 days late Feb/early March

Hi all

I'm looking for some advice about where to go for a ski holiday.

We're from South Africa and not regular skiers (some people in the group will probably be complete beginners). We also don't have any equipment so will need to rent. We've all learnt a little Spanish in the past couple years (through various other travels) and would like an opportunity to practice this, but it's not essential. I speak some Dutch and my gf some Dutch and German. I've been to Solden, Saalbach (both Austria) and Arabba (Italy) before and would like something a bit different, though this again is not absolutely essential.

Group could be just me + girlfriend or could include some friends up to a total of about 6 people at this stage and looking to do this for at least 10 days in late February/early March.

Package European ski holidays available in SA seem to be full of forced fun activities (not our thing) and I haven't come across one that offers self-catering accommodation (which we would prefer). I'm therefore leaning towards a self-drive, self-catering, self-organized option so need to decide on a resort that's going to make this as effortless as possible.

Aside from the above, budget is probably the biggest deciding factor. I therefore started by looking mainly at Eastern Europe, but the resorts seem to be much smaller with less skiing options and possibly??? less snow so late in the season. Although accommodation, skiing, food & drink is fairly cheap compared to rest of Europe, flights from SA are more expensive and this is likely to be our single biggest expense. Thus overall Eastern Europe doesn't really offer us a cost advantage and a bigger resort in the Alps or Pyrenees actually works out to be about the same on total cost. Based on that I started looking more at Spain (Thinking cost of flights and quality of resorts would be in line with most western European destinations and Spain should be a bit cheaper...) and am currently investigating Sierra Nevada, but I'm still open to ideas.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.