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