Absolute Alps Holidays Ski Blog

I love the Portes du Soleil ski area and I think it’s one of the best in France if not the World! So I’ve put together a few statistics to show how the largest ski domains in France compare.

Total Kilometres of Ski Pistes

The Portes du Soleil clearly comes out on top with the 650 kms of pistes throughout the whole domain.

There has been some controversy recently over how the resorts come up with these figures, with German ski author and cartographer Christoph Schrahe claiming pretty much every area exaggerates their numbers.

It is funny how every resort seems to add up to a pretty round number !

The Portes du Soleil should get busy revising their figures to include the brand new piste built for the new Super-Chatel to Linga link.

6 Day Ski Pass Price

A large chunk of the cost a ski holiday is the cost of your lift pass for the week.

This graph shows the cost of a 6 day adult lift pass covering the whole area.

Portes du Soleil comes in second best in this category.

Remember to book your ski holiday with Absolute Alps and receive an extra 10% discount on the cost of the your ski passes.

 Ski Pass Costs per Kilometre

But what you really want to know is that you are getting value for money with your ski pass.

So yet again we have the Portes du Soleil coming in first place with its fantastic value for money ski pass which costs €0.37 per kilometre of piste.

Which is significantly cheaper than everyone else, with the next closest 27% more expensive and then soaring up to 167% more for the most expensive area located at Alpe D’Huez.

Total Number of Individual Pistes

Variety is supposedly the spice of life and we want lots of different pistes to choose from when we go skiing.

Storming to the top spot with the only area to break the 300 mark is Les Trois Vallees. 330 is a lot, if you skied 6 hours a day for 6 days you would need to average over 9 runs an hour to tick them all off! I think you would need more than 1 holiday to tick them all off.

But a very respectable second place goes to the Portes du Soleil, and as mentioned earlier we should be adding an extra one for the new lifts and piste currently being finished in Chatel.

Highest Ski Lift in Area

Any list of skiing statistics wouldn’t be complete without a mention of height of the ski area.

A good win for Espace Killy here, which towers in at 3550 metres.

But we all know that size isn’t everything, don’t we ?

Go too high and it’ll be too cold in the winter, too white on cloudy days with no trees to help navigate.

So although Portes du Soleil looks a little low on the graph with average snowfall of 8 metres and plenty of tree lined runs for the white out days I think it’s a perfect height!

Conclusion – Portes du Soleil is the BEST !

Well I think my carefully selected statistics, were Portes du Soleil comes top twice & second twice, clearly show that my home ski domain is the best in France. But really I think you should come and see for yourself, and while skiing in one of the best ski domains why not stay in one of the best chalets in France – Chalet Les Trois Canards.

Hope to see you soon

There’s been plenty of new development and replacement work to the ski lifts in the Portes du Soleil again this summer, here’s a run down of the shiny new ski-lift facilities you’ll be able to find for winter 2015.

Firstly here’s a link to the newly issued Portes du Soleil piste map for 2015, which has been updated to show the new lifts and pistes for the coming season. Check out the pink “NEW” stars showing the recent upgrades!

Chatel & Pre-la-Joux Area

Starting with the local ski area.

New Ski-Lifts & Pistes between Linga and Super-Chatel

As mentioned in my earlier post the long talked about and anticipated link between the Chatel’s two ski areas is finally being built.

The latest updates to this are:

• Both lifts will be the high speed detachable type, the initial plan was for one of the lifts to be a refurbished older style slow lift but there will now be a brand new 6 person detachable up to Super-Chatel called “Portes du Soleil” and a refurbished 4 person detachable going to Linga called “Gabelou”.
• The blue piste from Linga to Gabelou has been totally reshaped from the old windy track into a broad and fairly straight piste, making it easy for beginners to return to Chatel.
• The project is reportedly currently running a little behind schedule and is reported looking at a January opening. There has been an official announcement saying it will definitely be open this winter but the opening date has not been confirmed yet.

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