How to ski or board in Scotland for £8 a day (or less) this winter

Perfect conditions on the Spring Run at Glencoe Mountain Resort, January 2023 | Stevie McKenna / Ski-Scotland

When did working out the cost of a day’s skiing get so complicated? At some point in the not-too-distant past it felt like the choices were straightforward: as a tourist, you’d either arrive at a ski resort and pay for a day pass, or, if you were planning to ski at the same place for a while you might book a multi-day pass and get a bit of a discount. If you were lucky enough to live locally, you might look to save even more by buying a season pass. And, well...in the olden days that was about the extent of your options.

Over the last few years though, things like multi-resort season passes, dynamic pricing and early-bird discounts have muddied the waters to an almost ridiculous extent. As the US ski journalist Stuart Winchester recently pointed out in his Storm Skiing newsletter, the wild variations in lift pass prices in Colorado for the 2024/25 season make it possible to argue convincingly both that skiing has never been more affordable and that skiing has never been more expensive.

My favourite stat from the many bonkers examples Winchester highlights: single-day, pre-purchased lift tickets at Colorado’s Purgatory resort for the 24/25 season are currently on sale for as little as $9 (£6.70); meanwhile, if you rock up to Vail in the middle of peak season and try to buy a day pass over the counter, it'll set you back a cool $329 (£245).

Perhaps the most notable take-home message from Winchester's research, though, is this: if you're planning to ski regularly, or even semi-regularly, the right multi-resort season pass can represent seriously good value for money, giving you a winning combination of bargain-basement prices plus the flexibility to visit different ski areas throughout the season.

Snowboarders at Glenshee Ski Centre, 2024 | Lisa Ferguson / The Scotsman

Here in Scotland, the kind of early-bird single-day tickets that make skiing at Purgatory such a steal haven't caught on yet, but it’s still possible to make huge savings thanks to the Four Area Pass from ski-scotland. On sale from now until 30 November, the pass is valid for the entire 2024/25 ski season at Glencoe, Glenshee, The Lecht and Nevis Range and costs £495 for adults and £260 for children. Whether that represents good value for you will depend on how often you’re able to use it, but it can potentially offer huge savings.

How huge? Let’s crunch the numbers. On average, a full-price one-day adult lift ticket at the four resorts included in the pass will set you back £35.60 this season (taking into account the fact that Glencoe and Nevis charge less on weekdays.) So, if a holder of a Four Area Pass clocked up 14 days skiing across December, January, February, March, April and (possibly) May, they could be said to have broken even –that is: they’d be no better or worse off than if they’d simply bought full-price day passes instead. Every additional day they managed to ski on top of that, however, they'd be starting to save.

How much it’s possible to save will of course depend to a significant extent on what kind of ski season we get. Last season we suffered one of the worst snow winters in the history of Scottish skiing (the third worst, to be precise), but snow-sure Glencoe still managed to offer 62 days of skiing. If a Four Area Pass holder had skied every one of those days, they would have ended up paying approximately £8 a day.

The Back Corries at Nevis Range | Stevie McKenna / ski-scotland

That’s pretty much a worst-case scenario though. In a good year, Glencoe can offer as many as 110 days of skiing, so if the coming season hits those kinds of numbers, a very keen skier with the time and energy to go skiing every day the lifts are running could end up paying just £4.50 a day.

Thanks to the steep-sided gullies of its upper slopes, Glencoe usually manages to hang onto its snow for longer than the other three resorts included in the pass, and as a result it generally offers a longer ski season. However, Four Area Pass holders are free to ski or board at all four resorts whenever they want, and in Scotland that flexibility is a bigger advantage than it would be elsewhere in the skiing universe.

Family skiing at The Lecht ski centre in the Cairngorms | Stevie McKenna / Ski-Scotland

Of course, variety is the spice of life, and no matter how much you might love one resort, after skiing it whenever you can for a few weeks you might decide you’d like a change. The key advantage of the Four Area Pass, though, is it means you can always ski where the conditions are best – and different winter weather patterns can mean very different things for Scotland's ski resorts. Periods of exceptionally cold weather from the north-east (remember the Beast from the East?) tend to favour Glenshee and The Lecht, whereas big storm systems barrelling in off the Atlantic tend to drop the majority of their precipitation in the west – good news for Glencoe and Nevis.

If you have a season pass for a resort on one side of the country and the other side is up to its oxters in snow, you'll be left cursing your bad luck; with a Four Area Pass, though, you're free to go wherever Mother Nature has decided to deposit her latest snow bounty.

Scotland being Scotland, there will always be days when the weather keeps you off the hills entirely, but with the freedom to follow the white stuff (and save more money every time you do), the game is at least somewhat rigged in your favour.

For more on the Four Area Pass, visit www.snowsportscotland.org/four-area-pass