How to Use Seasoned.info: A Full Tour of the Site

Most ski-resort sites are built for holidaymakers choosing where to spend a week. Seasoned.info is built for the opposite: people deciding where to live and work for four to six months. That single difference shapes every tool on the site — what we measure, how we rank it, and how the tools fit together.

Here's the full tour, and a suggested order for using it.

The resort database and resort pages

At the core of the site is a database of 250+ ski resorts worldwide, each with its own page at /resorts/[resort]. A resort page pulls together the stats that matter to a seasonaire — skiable area, vertical, season length, average snowfall, cost of living, rent, airport distance and more — with each figure shown alongside its source.

Two things make the resort pages different from a tourist site:

• Every stat is sourced. We store where each number came from and when it was collected, so you can see whether a figure is from the resort's own site, an independent aggregator, or a tourism board. Where sources disagree, a human picks the displayed value rather than a script averaging them silently.
• Stats are shown as percentiles, not just raw numbers. A resort's vertical drop is shown relative to every other resort in the database, so you can see instantly whether 1,200m is a lot or a little.

The Seasoned Score

Every resort with enough data gets a Seasoned Score out of 100 — a single composite number that ranks resorts from a working-season perspective. It weights the things that matter over a long stay (affordability, terrain size, season length, snowfall) far more heavily than a tourist ranking would.

The score is deliberately transparent: the full weighting is published, both on the how we score page and in the write-up of how the Seasoned Score works. It's a starting point for narrowing hundreds of resorts to a shortlist — not the final word.

The leaderboards

If you care about one specific thing, the leaderboards rank every resort on a single stat. There are fourteen of them, including:

• Highest Seasoned Score — best overall for a season
• Longest Seasons — most days open, directly tied to your earning window
• Most Skiable Terrain — biggest mountains, so you don't ski them out by March
• Cheapest Rent and Cheapest Beer — the two best proxies for cost of living
• Highest Average Salary — estimated net monthly pay for entry-level roles
• Gnarliest Terrain, Best for Beginners, Best Backcountry Access, Best for Carvers — terrain profiles for different skiers
• Best Snowfall, Biggest Vertical, Best Nightlife, Closest Airport

Each leaderboard shows where a resort sits relative to the rest of the field, so you're never looking at a number in isolation.

The resort finder quiz

The leaderboards rank on one stat at a time and the Seasoned Score uses one fixed set of weights. The resort finder quiz is for when your priorities are your own. You answer a handful of questions about what matters to you — price, snow, terrain, nightlife, gnarliness, backcountry, airport proximity — and the site re-ranks all 250+ resorts using your weighting instead of the default.

It's the same scoring engine as the Seasoned Score, just run with your numbers rather than ours. If you want the full detail of how that works, see how the resort finder quiz works.

The comparison tool

Once you've narrowed things down, the comparison tool puts up to five resorts side by side across every stat. This is the stage where you stop ranking and start deciding: seeing Morzine, Verbier and Val Thorens in three columns makes the trade-offs — cheaper rent versus bigger terrain versus longer season — obvious in a way a ranked list can't.

The visa tools

None of the above matters if you can't legally work where you want to go. Two tools cover that:

• The visa eligibility checker takes your nationality and age and instantly shows which countries you can legally work a ski season in — including which schemes (working holiday, seasonal-worker permits, freedom of movement) apply to you.
• The visa guides go country-by-country in depth, covering the full range of routes into a season — not just working-holiday visas — and are checked against official government sources.

The knowledge base

The resources section is the written side of the site: destination guides, job advice, budgeting, kit lists, timelines and safety, organised into collections. If you're planning a season for the first time, the Essentials collection is the curated starting path.

The assistant

There's a chat assistant on most pages (bottom-right). It answers questions using the site's own blog posts and visa guides, so it stays on-topic for seasonaires rather than guessing. If it can't answer something, the question gets logged so we can write the guide that was missing.

What's coming

Two big features are on the roadmap and not fully live yet: seasonaire reviews — real submitted data on pay, rent, hours and accommodation at specific resorts and employers — and a job board. When the reviews system launches, its data will start feeding into a future version of the Seasoned Score, with the methodology published the same way the current one is.

A suggested order

1. Take the quiz to get a personalised shortlist.
2. Check the visa tool to remove anywhere you can't legally work.
3. Read the resort pages for your shortlist to sanity-check the stats and read the area summaries.
4. Compare your final two or three side by side.
5. Dig into the visa guide and job advice for your chosen country before you apply.

That's the whole site, in the order that turns "somewhere with snow" into a specific plan.