How the Resort Finder Quiz Works

The same engine as the Seasoned Score — but run with your priorities instead of ours

The Seasoned Score ranks resorts using one fixed set of weights — our considered judgement about what matters to most people working a season. But "most" isn't "everyone". If your employer provides accommodation, rent is irrelevant to you. If you're an expert skier, gnarliness matters far more than the default. The resort finder quiz exists to apply your priorities instead of ours.

It's one engine, not two

The most important thing to understand: the quiz and the Seasoned Score are the same calculation. There's a single scoring function that takes a resort and a set of weights and returns a number. The public Seasoned Score is that function run once with one fixed, published weighting. The quiz is the same function run with the weighting you choose.

That's deliberate. It means your personalised ranking is directly comparable to the default one — it isn't a different, looser system bolted on the side.

What actually happens when you take it

You set your priorities. The quiz asks how much you care about factors like price, snowfall, terrain size, vertical, nightlife, gnarliness, backcountry access and airport proximity. Your answers become a set of weights.
Every resort is scored on percentiles. For each stat, a resort is ranked against every other resort with data for that stat — from worst (0) to best (1) for a seasonaire. So the calculation is always "how does this resort compare to the field", never a raw number.
"Cheaper is better" stats are inverted. For costs — rent, groceries, ticket prices, beer — a low value is good, so the percentile is flipped before it's used. You never have to worry about direction; the engine handles it.
Your weights are applied and summed. Each resort's percentiles are multiplied by your weights and added up, then scaled to a 0–100 score, and the whole database is re-ranked for you.

Why some resorts show no score

A resort needs enough data across enough stats to produce a meaningful score. If a resort in your results has no score, it means data collection for it is still incomplete — not that it scored badly. We'd rather show no number than a misleading partial one.

How to read your result

Your top result is a starting point, not a verdict. Two things to do with it:

Sanity-check the top five on their resort pages. The quiz optimises for the stats you weighted; it can't know that a particular resort has no jobs in your trade, or that the visa doesn't work for your nationality.
Run the visa checker early. There's no point falling for a resort you can't legally work in. Filtering by visa eligibility first, then taking the quiz, often saves disappointment.

What the quiz can't do (yet)

The current engine uses only objective, externally-sourced statistics. It doesn't yet know how good the staff accommodation actually is at a given employer, or how many people would do the season again — because that data comes from seasonaire reviews, which are still being built. When the reviews system launches, those signals will feed a future version of the engine, and the methodology will be published exactly as the current one is.

For the full weighting behind the default ranking, see how the Seasoned Score works. To just get your shortlist, take the quiz.