HOW WE MEASURE
Where every number on a ski area page comes from, how the beginner, family and expert verdicts are computed, how a village becomes a base, and how rentals are ranked.
EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE
Statistics, verdicts and rankings are computed from data by the same rules for every resort. No resort, lift company or shop can pay for a better number. Sponsored placements, if any, are labeled and never displace an editorial position.
SKI AREA STATISTICS
A ski area on SkiTrip is the set of pistes and lifts that OpenStreetMap maps for it. We take that geometry through OpenSkiMap and compute:
Pistes
- Kilometres of marked downhill piste, summed per difficulty as tagged on the map: green (novice), blue (easy), red (intermediate), black (advanced) and expert or marked freeride
- Top and bottom altitude, the longest single run and the biggest vertical on one run, from the elevation of the piste geometry
- Nursery runs: short green or blue runs (100–900 m) that start next to a lift base
- Cross-country kilometres, counted separately and never added to the downhill total
Lifts
Every lift is counted once and grouped by type: gondolas and cable cars, chairlifts (with bubble or heated seats noted where mapped), T-bars, button lifts, rope tows, magic carpets, funiculars.
Unions and sectors
Where several resorts are lift-linked into one area (the 4 Vallées, the Skicircus, the Grand Massif) the map often holds one polygon. We split it into its named sectors by proximity to each village, so Nendaz, Veysonnaz and Verbier each have their own page, and the union page keeps the combined figures. A page built this way says “computed” under its statistics.
Official figures
Resorts count differently — some publish slope-area kilometres, some add linked areas, some round up. Where we have read an official figure on the resort's own page, we show it next to ours with a link to the page and the season it applies to. The two numbers will often differ; both are true for what they measure.
WHO A SKI AREA SUITS
Every ski area carries three verdicts — beginners, families, experts — each one yes, with caveats or not really. They are computed from measured data, never from opinion, and the facts behind each verdict are printed next to it.
BEGINNERS
Points for the share of green and blue kilometres (40 % or more scores highest, 25 % scores half), for at least 15 km of easy piste in absolute terms, for a magic carpet, and for two or more nursery runs at a lift base. A point off when black and expert terrain is 30 % or more of the area. Four points is a yes, two or three is with caveats, less is not really. An area with under 3 km of piste is never a yes.
FAMILIES
Starts from the beginner verdict and adds what matters with small children: magic carpets, gondolas or cable cars so nobody has to load a chairlift, and a base from which you reach the lifts on foot or on skis.
EXPERTS
Kilometres of black, expert and marked freeride terrain, the biggest vertical on a single run, and the size of the area.
A verdict can be wrong where OpenStreetMap is incomplete — a resort whose blue runs are not mapped will score too low. Tell us and we will check the source.
BASES AND ACCESS
A base is a place you can book and sleep in. We look for settlements around every lift station — towns, villages and purpose-built stations — and keep those with lodging and shops. Each base gets one honest access label:
The distance is measured from the settlement's own centre point to the nearest lift base station, so it describes the village, not a particular hotel. A purpose-built station where every bed sits on the piste is marked as such only where we have checked it by hand.
Valley towns are the cheaper places further down the road: every town within reach that has lodging and food, with the road distance, the driving time and, where one exists, the bus line into the resort. A town that serves several resorts is listed under each of them.
SKI RENTAL RANKINGS
The “best ski rentals” lists are built from OpenStreetMap only, and say so on every page. A shop qualifies when the map tags it as a ski rental or ski shop. It is then scored on what the map records about it — a website, a phone number, opening hours, a workshop — and on its distance to the base centre. There are no customer reviews in these scores yet; the “reputation” line reads zero until we add a verified review source. A shop we cannot place on the map is not listed. Lists with fewer than three places stay reachable from the base page but are kept out of search engines.
SPONSORED PLACEMENTS
Should a business pay for visibility, its placement is:
- Always labeled “Sponsored” or “Featured partner”
- Displayed separately from the editorial list
- Never allowed to displace or reorder an editorial position
FAMOUS PISTES
A piste page shows the run as the map draws it: length, vertical, average and maximum gradient, and the profile sampled along the geometry. A World Cup course is named by its FIS name where we could match it to the mapped run; every other run keeps the name the map gives it. A run we cannot match to a name keeps no name rather than a guessed one.
DATA SOURCES
Pistes, lifts, difficulties, altitudes, settlements, bus lines, shops
Official piste kilometres, lift counts, piste maps — cited by URL and season
World Cup venues, courses and disciplines
Municipality population and elevation
Photos and footage, each with its licence and credit
All images carry attribution. We never scrape platforms that prohibit it, and we never use AI-generated imagery for landscapes or resorts. Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors.
UPDATE FREQUENCY
- Map data: re-ingested from OpenSkiMap; every statistic is recomputed and dated on the page
- Official figures: re-read before each season and dated with the season they apply to
- Bases and access: recomputed when the map changes; bus lines re-checked with it
- Rankings: rebuilt from the current map on each refresh
FEEDBACK & CORRECTIONS
Found a wrong number, a missing lift or a village in the wrong valley? Write to [email protected]. We check every report against the source and correct the data, not just the page.
Last updated: September 2026