Ski resort food and drink prices: how an £8.86 slope coffee can blow a lift-pass budget

A lift pass is usually the headline cost of a ski holiday, but it is rarely the number that blows the budget. Coffee, lunch, beer and wine on the slopes routinely cost several times what the same order fetches in town — and at the extreme end of the market, a single round can rival the daily cost of the lift pass itself.

Every year, Post Office Travel Money publishes a Ski Resort Report comparing costs across major European and North American resorts. The 2018 edition, the latest available at the time of this analysis, priced a six-day lift pass, ski and boot hire, and group lessons at more than 30 resorts spread across the Alps, the Pyrenees, Scandinavia, Bulgaria and North America, alongside a basket of on-mountain food and drink. Lunch prices were based on two courses — a main course and a dessert — for a family of four, excluding drinks; individual drink items, including coffee, Coke, beer and wine, were priced per person. The lift pass and equipment figures tend to track resort to resort fairly predictably; it is the food-and-drink side of the data that shows just how far a ski budget can be blown by items that never appear on the lift-pass invoice.

The £8.86 slope coffee

At the cheap end, La Thuile in Italy had the least expensive daily coffee in the 2018 report, at just £0.90 for a large cup. Across every resort surveyed, a large coffee on the slope averaged £2.91. At the other extreme sat Trysil in Norway, where the same order came to £8.86 — a figure so far outside the rest of the table that it was reportedly double-checked before publication. Over a six-day trip, one coffee a day at Trysil prices adds up to roughly £53: more than a week's worth of daily coffees would cost at almost any other resort in the survey.

A skier who buys one coffee a day in Trysil pays roughly what a week of daily coffees costs at most other resorts in the survey.

Coke, beer and wine tell the same story

The pattern repeats for other drinks. A small Coke averaged £2.88 across the resorts Post Office surveyed, with Bansko in Bulgaria the cheapest at £0.77 and Trysil again the most expensive, matching its own coffee price at £8.86. Alcohol showed a similarly wide spread: a 25cl beer in Bansko cost £1.35, while a 50cl glass of wine ranged from £1.88 in Bansko to almost £18 in Trysil. Averaged across every resort, one alcoholic drink cost about £4.80 — with beer in major European resorts typically running £3.50–£4.00 and wine £6–£9, before Trysil's outlier prices are even counted. In most European resorts beer undercut wine; in the North American resorts surveyed, that ordering reversed.

Lunch is the biggest single line item

Drinks show the sharpest individual markups, but lunch is where the largest sum is actually spent. The 2018 report's two-course restaurant lunch — main and dessert, excluding drinks, priced for a family of four — put Trysil at the top again, at £32.40 per person, or close to £130 for a family of four. Notably, Trysil's lunch premium was far less extreme than its drinks premium: most major European resorts charged around £27 per person for the same two courses, and the average across every resort surveyed came to £20.11.

Why on-mountain prices run so high

None of this is unique to the 2018 season or to Europe. A captive audience, higher operating costs at altitude, and limited competition once a skier is already on the mountain are the standard explanations, and the pattern has persisted well beyond 2019. More recent US market reporting puts on-mountain lodge food at roughly 40–100% above equivalent off-mountain prices, and identifies food, equipment rental, resort parking and lessons — not the lift ticket itself — as the costs most likely to derail a ski budget. Getting supplies onto a mountain in the first place costs more than stocking a shop in town, and once a skier has clicked out of their bindings for lunch, there is rarely a cheaper option a short walk away. The lift pass is the cost most travellers plan for in advance; the food and drink built around it is the cost that tends to catch them out.

Cutting the on-mountain bill

None of the figures above are reasons to avoid the mountain — they are reasons to budget for it properly. A few habits make the difference between a food-and-drink bill that matches expectations and one that quietly outgrows the lift pass:

• Pack a lunch or snacks rather than buying a two-course meal on the mountain each day.
• Carry a refillable bottle or flask instead of buying drinks at slope prices.
• Check a resort's food and drink prices before booking, if the total cost of the trip matters as much as the lift pass rate.
• Budget drinks and lunch as a fixed daily line rather than an afterthought — at the priciest resorts they can rival the lift pass in cost.

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