Skiing is expensive, and the pass is only part of it. But for a family learning, a group of friends out for the day or a student skiing on Sundays, it is the part that can vary five-fold depending on the resort. This article looks at the resorts where the adult day pass is listed under €30 on this season’s official list, and says who they suit.
Under €20: skiing close to home
Prabouré, in the Forez, and Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet, on the Petites Roches plateau above Grenoble, list the day at €15. Both are resorts of a few runs, run by councils or associations, open when the snow is there. The Col de Porte, in the Chartreuse forty minutes from Grenoble, is at €17: two kilometres of pistes, but a resident Météo-France station that makes it one of the best-measured places in France — 16 complete winters, 91 days a winter with at least 30 cm on the ground.
The Semnoz, twenty minutes from Annecy, sells the day at €18.50 and a 4-hour pass at €15.50 — the only resort on the list with hourly rates, from €13.50 for two hours to €17.50 for six. Sixteen kilometres of pistes between 1,450 and 1,700 m, a view of Mont Blanc, and chairlifts: for a family’s first day on skis it is hard to beat.
€20 to €26: the Vosges, the Pyrenees, the Massif Central
Gaschney, at €20, and Schnepfenried, at €25.50, are two resorts on the Alsace side of the Vosges, under an hour from Colmar. La Bresse Lispach, at €22, is the nordic, family-oriented neighbour of La Bresse Hohneck, the big Vosges resort at €41.50.
In the Pyrénées-Orientales, La Quillane, at €24.50, is a beginners’ resort on the Capcir plateau. Prat Peyrot, on Mont Aigoual in the Cévennes, lists €26 — its list is the 2024-2025 one, the resort not having published the next.
At Plaine-Joux, above Passy facing Mont Blanc, €25.50 buys ten kilometres of pistes and one of the finest views in the Alps.
Around €40: the “big” mid-mountain resorts
A step up are the resorts that make a real week: Super-Besse at €43.50, in the Sancy, with 54 km of pistes between 1,350 and 1,850 m and 14 floodlit runs — the French record for night skiing after Le Collet d’Allevard; Le Lioran, in the Cantal, at the door of a railway station; Le Mont-Dore, on the other side of the Sancy. They cost more than the previous ones because they offer more: chairlifts, a proper area, a ski school.
What the price does not say: the snow
A €15 resort that opens for only three weeks a winter is expensive per kilometre skied. That is why each resort page shows, out of season, what the nearest Météo-France station has measured on the ground over at least ten complete winters: the number of days a winter with 30 cm or more, fortnight by fortnight. In the mid-mountains that figure runs from under 20 days to over 90 depending on the range and the altitude — and it is what separates a bargain from a gamble.
The table below is our ranking of resorts under €35, computed live on the published lists.
