Jen and I decided to go “Out West” to go skiing for our vacation this year but deciding where and finding the right package has been a chore. We’ve looked everywhere from Park City Utah, Tahoe, Jackson’s Hole, Big Sky, Vail, and I even looked into Killington Vermont. We looked everywhere in between as well and just couldn’t make up our minds.

I haven’t skied in a few years and my wife hasn’t ever being skiing so that factored into our process as well. It shouldn’t be a problem as I have skied a lot and its just like riding a bike and we hope to get Jen a few lessons or at least 1 before we go out there.

Our Goals for Finding the Right Ski Trip:
-Wallet friendly. We didn’t want anything expensive or extravagant but wanted comfortable.
-Activities and night life outside of the slopes.
-The slopes had to be equally beginner/intermediate and advanced.
-Convenience (getting there and getting to the mountain)

We did some research and found that our best bet was probably to do a package through a travel agent, resort or ski company. The Alpine Ski Center in Raleigh had a good one for about $1400 per person to Big Sky Montana so we used that one as our base for measuring packages.

Travel Zoo had some good options but I think we waited too long on the $500 Tahoe deal and flights to Reno, NV were fairly expensive. The resorts all have their own packages but they usually don’t give you the best deals on airfare so we only briefly looked into those. United Airlines announced a system wide sale so I started looking around for airfare but being that RDU is not a big hub for United Airlines the deals were limited. It did however give me another idea. American Airlines vacation site, AAvacations.com is what we used for our London trip last year and we thought we got a pretty good deal so I decided to check it out.

Much to my delight they had several packages for reasonable prices to Park City, Utah which was one of the areas we were seriously considering. After a little deliberation we settled on Park City for 5 nights, including airfare from RDU and 3 day lift tickets for $1682. I think that is pretty good deal for 2 people. We are still waiting for AA to update their website to include the lift tickets in the package before we buy it but it looks pretty certain (I called AA and they said that it was a mistake and would be fixed in a day or so).

**Update on Thursday** called AA again and they didnt want to mention that there was a blackout date which ended the first day of our trip. I went over to Orbitz and got the same trip for $300 cheaper. Orbitz and go!

The hotel we are planning to stay at is the Park City Peaks Hotel. It has a good location at one of the Free city bus stops, ski tram (to the mountains), indoor/outdoor pool and hot tub and the best part (which is not on their site for some reason) every evening a hot chocolate and cookie cart comes around to your room. Free chocolate cookies FTW!

Useful Park City Links
Park City Town Map
Park City Mountain Resort site

Resources:
MSN Top 10 Undiscovered Ski Spots
By far the Best Trail Map of any mountain. Most are annoying PDF files, this one is not.
Deer Valley is also in the area and has a lot of Green trails

A couple of ski lodges that get great ratings w/o the crowds
Powder Mountain (PowMow)
Solitude Mountain Resort