You're About To Discover The Best Places to Go to Find Cheap Ski Holidays This Winter

When doing the research for this piece, I found a ski holiday business that offers just what you are after. If you are young and laid back, this would be the cheapest method of arranging your ski holiday.

Just to put you in the picture I run my own site selling catered chalet holidays, but what I've found now are a lot cheaper and may be advertising them shortly! But let's get on.

Thirty years ago I was employed by a company which sold cheap ski holidays. Diamond Ski (not their real name!) really were great value. Their prices may have gone up now but they still do great ski deals. I know because I worked for them. Well I didn't truthfully work for them. they paid me to have a rollocking winter in the mountains at the punters' expense.

For a salary of £50 a week, free board and lodging, a lift pass and free transport, I lived the life and the punters paid. What the punters paid for was the cheapest possible service - draughty old chalets at rock bottom rents high on the hillsides and a hundred steps to clamber up with their bags a welcome from a toothy bimbette who was only in the resort to score as many young men as she could, and a ride in a battered old banger that rattled and smoked its way up from Geneva Airport As well as being a taxi driver part of the job involved taking them skiing - if we felt like it.

This may seem like a red herring but it isn't - this is what to expect on a cheap holiday. What you pay is what you get - just the absolute minimum with nothing added unless you want to pay for it, just like that no frills airline which shall be nameless. You are unlikely to get more than you pay for, but sometimes there are cheap deals to be found with a good cheap ski holiday.

For some of the best late deals in French Ski Resorts type in 'Cheap Ski Holidays France' as a Google search.

There is no way you are going to spend as little on a ski holiday as a summer beach vacation - I've just found a late summer deal to Crete for £218 leaving next week (I haven't gone for it yet). The stuff you have to buy to go skiing bear little relation to a g-string.. The only bits of ski wear that double up on the snow or beach are the sun glasses and sun cream, and if you are a fashionista with fair ski, then you will be getting stronger versions of these too.

Discounting the ski clothes that can be spread across a few years, you now have to arrange the travel, board and lodging and food, ski equipment hire, lift pass, ski lessons and insurance. How much is that going to be? Choose a typical ski resort in France like Meribel. The cheapest I can find is the first week in January for £318, which includes flight and accommodation only All the other necessaries I've mentioned above is going to cost at least £450 on top of that, which comes to around £750 - a lot more than a summer holiday.

So what's the bottom line from here? Last season my son found the best deal available. Action Outdoors is the name on the tin. A basic, all inclusive holiday during January is going to cost you just £467, but that's pared right down. You get what you pay for All in my son spent £600 and had a spiffing time skiing on the best snow ever - he worked out he'd spent about £130 on alcohol and the nightlife, which I considererd was good going.