What Your Ski Resort Website Needs Before the Season Opens

November is when a lot of winter trips get planned. Christmas, New Year and the February holidays are all booked in the weeks before the first lift turns, which means a resort's website does much of its selling while the slopes are still green.

At the end of September we read the official websites of 49 European ski resorts in detail, as part of the research behind SkiTable's resort guides. They were the resorts people search for most on SkiTable, so they lean towards well-known names rather than the smallest ski areas. Even so, the gaps we found were the familiar ones, and they are easy to close before December. This checklist is built from them.

1. This winter's prices, labelled as this winter's

By 28 September, 37 of the 49 resorts had published their prices for 2026/27. Eight still showed only last season's list, and four had nothing at all for the coming winter. In one case the online shop was still selling summer and autumn activities only.

Last season's prices are not useless to a visitor, as long as the page says clearly that they are last season's. The real problem is a table with no season on it. The reader cannot tell whether the price is current, so they either assume it will change or go and look at a resort that is clearer.

If your 2026/27 tariff is not final yet, say so, and say when it will be. A line such as "Prices for winter 2026/27 will be published in mid-November" answers the question a visitor came with, even though it contains no price.

2. Opening and closing dates, even provisional ones

We could find both an opening and a closing date on the official site for 28 of the 49 resorts. For the other 21, at least one of the two was missing, or so well hidden that we did not find it.

Season dates matter more than they look. A family thinking about a week in early December needs to know whether the lifts are expected to run. A planned opening date marked "subject to snow conditions" is fine, because skiers understand weather. What nobody can plan around is no date at all.

If you open in stages, say that too: which lifts or sectors open first, and roughly when the rest follow.

3. A way to buy, right next to the prices

Of the 43 resorts whose sites pointed to somewhere to buy, 18 sent visitors to a shop on a different subdomain or a different website from the price list, reached through a separate link. Every extra step between "that looks right" and "pay" loses some people.

Put the buy button on the price page itself, next to the prices. Keep the steps few: date, who is coming, which passes, payment. Test the whole purchase on a phone as well as a computer, because a checkout that works on one and not the other loses sales quietly, and nobody writes in to tell you.

Some resorts in our sample sell only at the lift, and two of them take cash only. That is a reasonable choice for a small lift with a short season, but say it clearly on the website, near the top of the price page, so that nobody arrives at the bottom station with a card and no cash.

4. Say what happens after payment

The question that follows "how much?" is "and then what?". Do I get a ticket by email? Do I collect a card at the office? Is there a deposit? What do I need to bring?

Among the 49 resorts, 18 mentioned a keycard or chip card and 14 mentioned a deposit, usually a few euros. That is exactly the detail people want before they travel, and on many sites it sits in small print on a different page from the prices.

Write a short "after you buy" paragraph and put it beside the buy button. It should cover:

• where and when to collect passes, including the ticket office opening time on the first morning
• whether there is a card deposit, and how to get it back
• what proof is needed for reduced rates, such as a student card or proof of age
• what happens if the weather closes the lifts on the day, in whatever terms your own policy sets

5. Prices that families and week-long guests can find

Child, teen and senior prices, and passes for several days, are where most visitors' questions are. Make sure each reduced price says which ages it covers, either as ages or as years of birth, and that every multi-day length you sell is listed for every age you sell it to. We will come back to family and multi-day passes in more detail later this month.

6. Your visitors' languages

If a good share of your guests come from abroad, the price list and the checkout should be in their language as well as yours. A translated home page in front of a price list in one language only does not help much at the point where people decide.

7. Buy a pass yourself before opening day

The most useful pre-season test takes ten minutes. On a phone, on your own website, buy a pass the way a visitor would. Check that the confirmation email arrives, that it reads well and says what to do next. Then take it to your ticket office and make sure the staff on the first morning will know exactly what to do with it. Refund it afterwards.

If your website sends a Content-Security-Policy header, this test is also where a blocked script shows up. Browsers block silently, so a shop that is blocked does not show an error message; it simply does not appear.

Where SkiTable fits

If you do not sell online yet, SkiTable is built for this list. The checkout goes onto your existing price page with two lines of HTML, in any of eight languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Slovenian, Bulgarian and Romanian), styled to match your site. The setup wizard in the resort dashboard takes you through your passes, pricing, season dates and branding.

Payments go through Stripe Connect, so your resort is the merchant of record and is paid directly; SkiTable never holds your money. Buyers receive a confirmation email with an order number and collect their passes at your ticket office, so no gate integration is needed. The checkout can be used with a keyboard and a screen reader as well as a mouse.

None of this needs a new website. Most of it is editing pages you already have, and it is worth doing before the first family sits down to plan their February week.