What a ski week costs, week by week
The same board, pointed at lodging: every unit we can read at the destinations we track, priced for seven nights, Saturday to Saturday, for four guests. A price is graded only against its own tracked history for that week — never against a market average, because we do not buy one.
- Destinations
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- Units priced
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- Weeks tracked
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- Tracked since
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Check-in Saturday
Seven nights, Saturday to Saturday, four guests. The same stay at every destination, so the figures compare.
The week of the first tracked Saturday
Reading the lodging feed
Lodging tracking has started. Nothing appears here until the sweep has read a manager’s own rates; no row on this board is simulated.
What a place is comes from the manager’s own listing, not from a visit: we read what they publish and have stayed in none of them. A filter answers only what a manager states, so a unit that says nothing about a hot tub is not a unit without one — it is left out of that filter and never shown as lacking it.
Ski-in/ski-out: where a manager’s own published lift distance contradicts their prose, the distance wins, so a shuttle, a walk or a drive is recorded as that even where the listing still calls itself ski-in/ski-out.
Nothing on the board matches
How a lodging price is graded
Not like gear. A ski week has no list price, and a January week is not a worse version of an April one — it is a different thing, bought by different people, at a price the mountain sets. So there is nothing to mark a lodging price down from except the price we have watched that same unit ask for that same week.
- One unit, one week
- A unit is graded only against its own tracked readings for the same check-in Saturday. The first Saturday in January is compared with the first Saturday in January, never with the second week of April, and never with the unit next door.
- Three readings is the floor
- Under three readings of that unit for that week there is no grade, and the card says how long we have been tracking it and how many readings we hold. Two readings are an anecdote. We would rather print the price and say nothing about it.
- The drop is against its own median
- With three or more readings, the grade names how far today's quote sits under the median of every reading we hold for that unit and that week. The median, not the highest we ever saw, so one freak asking price cannot manufacture a discount.
- No market average, ever
- We never grade a price against an average of other units, other managers or other towns. We do not buy a market average and would not publish someone else's. A cheap unit is not a deal, and an expensive one is not a scandal.
- The quote is the quote
- A manager who publishes a weekly total is shown as a weekly total, fees and taxes as they published them. A manager who publishes only a nightly rate is shown as a nightly rate and says so: a nightly rate multiplied by seven is a guess, and a guess is a lie. Weeks a manager will not price on our terms read “no quote”, with no number at all.
- Same stay, every time
- Seven nights, Saturday to Saturday, four guests, at every destination. A price is meaningless without the stay it prices, so the stay never changes.
The rule is public and runs before anything else happens to the number. If a grade on this board does not match it, tell us. The gear board's rule, which works on a list price, is on How we grade.