How to get unlimited skiing in Scotland for the price of two days in Colorado
With Cairngorm back in the fold, the All Area Pass to Scotland’s ski resorts offers great value for money, writes Roger Cox
America has gone mad, and yes, I am of course talking about the cost of skiing there. For the winter of 2025/26, the resorts of Vail and Beaver Creek, both in Colorado, are joint top of the charts for the most expensive places to buy a day pass in the US of A. Rock up at the ticket window at either of these resorts during peak season and ask for a single day’s skiing and you’ll find yourself shelling out $356 or, at the current rate of exchange, £265. With the pistes typically open from 8:30am to 4pm, that works out at £35 per hour – which, as it happens, is almost exactly what you’d pay for a whole day on the slopes at full price here in Scotland.
It’s not just Vail and Beaver Creek that are charging big bucks on the other side of the Pond either: at Park City in Utah, they’re asking $351 (£261) a day during peak season; a short drive down the road at exclusive, skiers-only Deer Valley, meanwhile, it’s $319 (£237).
As a ski tourist in the US, you can of course save yourself some money by buying a multi-day pass – a five-day pass at Vail will set you back $1,100 (£818), or £164 per day. But the best part of a grand for five days of snow-sliding is still pretty steep, particularly when you still have to factor in the cost of flights, accommodation, ski hire, eating and drinking. Your bar tab could be considerable too, as you’ll probably want to drink enough to be able to forget how much you’ve spent on everything else.
Anyway, here in Scotland you can now make even bigger savings on the already very reasonable price of a day ticket thanks to ski-scotland’s newly-relaunched All Area Pass. For the last few years Cairngorm declined to sign up to the scheme, but happily they’re back on board for the 2025/26 season. This means that for £525 you can ski or snowboard as often as you like this winter at Cairngorm, Glenshee, Glencoe, The Lecht and Nevis Range. Yup – that’s right: a whole season of skiing in Scotland for about the price of two days of peak season skiing in Vail.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Vail is huge compared to Scotland’s ski hills, and the snow will almost certainly be better when I get there. Well, yes and no. It’s true that Vail, with 234km of marked runs, offers way more skiing than any of the Scottish resorts – heck, it offers way more skiing than most North American resorts too. However, when you add together all the runs on Scotland’s ski hills, you get a total of 136km, which is at least in the same ballpark.
As for the snow, sure, there’s not much arguing with Vail’s annual average snowfall of 899cm, but remember: your £500-odd quid has only bought you two days there. You might get lucky, and find yourself bouncing through bottomless powder for your chosen 48 hours, but equally you might get unlucky, coincide with a warm spell, and find yourself hacking through slush.
In Scotland, by contrast, your All Area Pass will allow you to pick and choose your days. If you live within easy striking distance of the hills (and most people in Scotland do, one way or another) you don’t need the snow to be good every single day from the start of December to the end of April, and you don’t need it to be good for the certain specific days you’ve selected for your ski trip either. In order to beat Vail for value, you just need it to get good a handful of times in that five-month window and be ready to take advantage.
As the old saying goes, the skiing in Scotland can be as good as anywhere on the right day. Granted, that line is usually delivered with a knowing smile and/or an ironic hoisting of an eyebrow, because those “right days” don’t come along as frequently as they do in the Rockies or the Alps, but when everything comes together Scottish skiing really can be magical. Equally, the skiing and snowboarding at the big-name resorts isn’t always perfect. Just for fun, try Googling “Park City” and “lift lines”. A resort workers’ strike there last winter left skiers queuing for up to three hours to get onto chairlifts – not a great use of time when you’re paying $351 a day.
In the first ever issue of this newspaper’s annual Scottish Ski & Board supplement, published back in December 2012, we carried a feature about a family of skiers from the village of Birkhill just north of Dundee. Michael and Moira Cambridge and their daughter Anna, then aged six, had got their winter ski routine down to a fine art. Armed with All Area Passes and a Fiat Auto-Roller 707 motorhome, they reported getting at least 40 days of skiing in every winter. Although their nearest hill was Glenshee, they would check the weather forecast and snow conditions carefully every week and then plan their weekend snow-sliding adventures accordingly. Lots of fresh snow in the west after a big Atlantic storm? Time to give Glencoe or Nevis a try. Better weather in the east? A toss-up, then, between Cairngorm, Glenshee and The Lecht.
In those days, with an All Area Pass costing £430 for adults and £235 for kids, they reckoned a day’s skiing for the three of them averaged out at about £25. To do the same now, with a kids All Area Pass priced at £280, the cost would be about £33 per day – which, as it happens, would buy you almost exactly one hour waiting in an American lift line.
The ski-scotland All Area Pass is available until 30 November, see www.ski-snowboard.scot
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