Today, I took a day off to attend the Daily Mail Ski Show. Weekdays have the obvious advantage of not being hoarded by visitors, therefore meeting and chatting with the various professionals was far easier and informative.
It’s the first time I attend a ski show in Europe. The first thing I noticed was the amount of travel agencies and tour operators attending. They were literally taking up about two thirds of the stands. A lot of prices were ridiculously low, making me wonder whether it was competition or sneaky tactics being used (such as not including obvious stuff like hotels, transport…). Also, there was a surprising prominence of landlord managed chalets agencies. In fact these sell packaged holidays in which you go to a big chalet of four or five rooms, managed by the owner, who takes care of everything else such as ski passes, meals and even excursions or ski lessons. It’s a format I never heard of but that seems going quite well.
The other thing is that ski salesmen, just like their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic, still talk a lot of bollocks. Mostly have no clue of even what the radius of each ski is, and are generally happy describing the ski as high-end or low-end, without much more detail, apart from useless gimmicks such as chip integration and magnesium power tubes . In fact, apart from flexible lifter plates (now everywhere), no sizeable improvement has been made in ski technology since the development of parabolic skis five years ago. The only major development, and it’s hardly positive, is that the days when any binding fitted any ski are over. Every manufacturer now pre-drills its skis to fit only their proprietary bindings. Indeed, the argument, happily parroted by the salesmen, is that this way engineers can “optimize” the bindings to the skis. Of course!
Nevertheless, I need to buy new skis and I managed to short list three:
- Atomic GS:9
- Head iXRC GS
- Fischer RC4 Worlcup RC
Now the mission is to find the best place to buy them from.
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