Family Ski Trips: The Complete Planning Guide

A ski holiday with children is decided long before anyone reaches the snow. The resort that photographs beautifully may have a ski school with a three-year waiting list and a nursery slope on the wrong side of a gondola. This book plans the trip backwards from the things that actually determine whether it works.

It begins with whether the family is ready at all, then moves through choosing a resort on the criteria that matter with small children, what passes and lessons genuinely cost once childcare is included, and how to equip a child who will have outgrown all of it by next winter. Bindings, helmets and the few pieces of kit that have to be right get their own chapter, because those are not the places to economise.

Then the practical grind: getting there with children and equipment, altitude and cold in small bodies, running the mountain day so nobody melts down at eleven o'clock, and tree wells and deep snow. There is a frank chapter on what happens when someone is hurt and what it costs abroad, and another on adaptive skiing for children who need something different.

The book closes with days off the snow, keeping teenagers interested once they would rather be anywhere else, taking the family abroad, and a month-by-month plan that turns all of it into a sequence of decisions rather than one overwhelming one.

DMP Press Publishing produces practical, plain-English guides to skiing, snowboarding and family travel in the mountains, written for readers who want to make better decisions rather than buy more equipment.