How the Seasoned Score Works

Comparing ski resorts is straightforward when you're choosing between two. You look at the stats that matter to you, weigh them up, and decide. When you're choosing between 300, it becomes impractical — manually comparing 9+ stats per resort across hundreds of options is the kind of task that ends with a spreadsheet you abandon after forty minutes.

A composite score solves that problem. One number per resort, produced consistently using the same method, lets you rank the full database and identify the realistic options quickly. The alternative — asking people to eyeball hundreds of data points — isn't more rigorous. It's just less efficient.

But a composite score is only as trustworthy as its methodology. A black-box number that nobody can audit is not a useful analytical tool; it's just an assertion. We publish the methodology completely — not as a summary, but as the actual weights and the reasoning behind each one.

What the Seasoned Score Is

The Seasoned Score is a weighted average of percentile rankings across 9 statistics. Here's exactly how it works:

1. For each stat, every resort in the database is ranked from worst to best for a seasonaire (0 = worst, 1 = best).
2. Each resort's raw value is converted to a percentile — where it falls relative to all other resorts with data for that stat.
3. Those percentiles are multiplied by the weights below and summed.
4. The result is scaled to a 0–100 range.

The weights:

| Stat | Weight | Direction | Why | |---|---|---|---| | Season length (days) | 25% | Longer = better | Directly tied to a seasonaire's income — every additional day is another day of wages. Nothing affects the economics of a season more directly. | | Average monthly rent (local currency, converted to USD) | 20% | Cheaper = better | The single largest fixed cost of a season. Rent determines what you actually take home. | | Skiable area (km²) | 15% | Larger = better | A seasonaire skis the same mountain for 4–6 months, not one week. Terrain size is about not getting bored in March, not holiday variety. | | Vertical drop (m) | 10% | Higher = better | More vertical per run means more variety within a session. A resort with 1,500m of vertical offers a meaningfully different daily skiing experience to one with 600m. | | Average annual snowfall (cm) | 10% | Higher = better | Consistent snowpack across the whole season matters. A resort with high average snowfall is less likely to have the bare-patch weeks in January and the slush problem in March that affect ski quality during the days you're actually using the pass. | | Airport distance (km) | 8% | Closer = better | Seasonaires fly home mid-season, between seasons, and at both ends of the contract — not just once. Airport distance affects your life more than it affects a tourist's. | | Weekly groceries (local currency, converted to USD) | 6% | Cheaper = better | The second major fixed cost after rent. A €20 difference in weekly groceries is €500 over a five-month season — not nothing. | | Day ticket price (local currency, converted to USD) | 4% | Cheaper = better | Lower weight because most seasonaires ski on a staff pass, not a day ticket. Included because it correlates with the general cost level of the resort and affects what guests and non-staff friends pay when they visit. | | Lift count | 2% | More = better | Lowest weight by design. Lift count is highly correlated with skiable area — more terrain needs more lifts to access it. The independent signal from this stat is small, so its independent weight is small. |

Why Seasonaire Weights Look Different to Tourist Weights

If you built a score to answer "which resort is best for a one-week ski trip," the weights above would be wrong. Season length would drop to near zero (a tourist is constrained by their holiday dates, not the resort's open season). Rent and groceries would be replaced by accommodation quality and restaurant prices. Terrain variety and lift count would weigh heavily.

The Seasoned Score doesn't do that. It's built for someone whose income, daily expenses, and quality of life for up to six months is tied to a single resort. Those people have different priorities to someone flying in for a week. The weights reflect that.

What the Score Is Not

It's not a holiday ranking. If you're planning a ski trip, use a tourist site. Skiresort.info, OnTheSnow, and Where-to-Ski are all built for your use case. The Seasoned Score is deliberately not built for it.

It's not definitive. The weights represent a considered judgment about what matters to most people doing a working season. "Most" is not "all." If you care very little about terrain and very much about snowfall quality, or if rent is irrelevant because your employer provides accommodation, the default score is a starting point rather than a final answer. The resort picker quiz lets you apply your own weights to the same underlying data.

It's not complete for every resort. Resorts without data for at least 6 of the 9 stats receive no score. A score built on 3 out of 9 stats would be misleading — better to show a blank than a number that appears rigorous but isn't. If a resort you care about shows no score, it means data collection for that resort is incomplete rather than that the resort scored zero.

How Costs Are Compared Across Currencies

Rent in Morzine is quoted in euros. Rent in Whistler is quoted in Canadian dollars. Rent in Niseko is in Japanese yen. Comparing these directly in local currency is meaningless.

Cost stats — rent, groceries, and ticket prices — are stored in local currency and converted to USD for scoring using exchange rates from frankfurter.app, a public, ECB-sourced currency API. The conversion rate used and the date it was applied are stored alongside the data. This means a €750 French room and a CAD 1,050 Canadian room are both represented as USD figures before the percentile calculation runs, making the comparison valid across countries.

Local currency values remain visible on resort pages alongside the converted figure — so you know what you're actually paying in the local economy, not just the abstract USD comparison number.

How the Score Will Evolve

The score formula is versioned. The current version uses only objective, externally-sourced statistics. That's a deliberate starting point — it avoids the noise of early-stage review data and keeps the methodology clean while the database is being built out.

Phase 4 of Seasoned.info adds user-submitted reviews: seasonaire ratings of their employers, accommodation quality, community strength, and general resort livability. Once enough reviews exist to be statistically meaningful (the threshold will be published when the reviews system launches), a new version of the formula will incorporate those signals — likely percentage who would return for another season and employer rating averages.

When that happens: old scores remain attributable to their old formula version. The new formula publishes its own full transparency breakdown, identical in format to this one. Scores don't silently change meaning — you'll always be able to see which version produced a number and what that version was doing.

The Bottom Line

The Seasoned Score is a consistent, transparent starting point for comparing ski resorts from a working-season perspective. The weights are shown in full above. The methodology is reproducible. The data sources are documented on each resort's stat rows.

It's useful for narrowing 300 resorts down to a realistic shortlist quickly. It's not a substitute for reading the resort pages, checking the visa situation for your nationality, and confirming the job market is there for the work you do.

For a version with your own weights applied, use the resort picker. To see how all resorts rank on the default formula, see the leaderboard.