Hi there,
Back in 2012 I started Snowbistro to help the ski trade with its marketing. Fourteen years later, it’s taking a new direction.
Snowbistro now connects UK ski operators with suppliers on a new leaderboard style site 👉 snowbistro.com
We have categories for ski rental, instructors, transfers, software, hospitality, marketing, recruitment and insurance.
The first bid on the board is by Alpy.com, the independent online ski rental marketplace connecting skiers with local rental shops across Europe. Bids start from £10.
I launched a similar bid up dynamic last week in the world of B2B padel (what I do when there is no snow!). You can see this at bidpadel.com and it’s starting to take off with a couple of three figure bids within the last 24 hours:
And this newsletter is coming back with it: a short weekly briefing on the business of UK skiing. Operators, suppliers, numbers worth knowing, and the odd opinion.
You're getting this because at some point we've crossed paths in the ski trade. If it's not for you, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom, no hard feelings.
The operators board is live
I've built a board comparing 50 UK-facing ski operators and travel specialists. You can rank them by:
Estimated organic search traffic
Domain Rating
ATOL licensed passenger capacity
Number of ski resorts offered
Years established
It isn't a "best ski company" list. Each measure tells a different story, and operators can't pay to move up it (whereas suppliers can).
Three things the numbers say
1. "Biggest" depends entirely on what you measure.
Crystal Ski's licence holder, TUI UK, has 5.9 million ATOL places. But that licence covers far more than skiing, so it tells you nothing about ski market share. Strip it out and the ATOL top three are WeSki (75,300), Heidi (71,061) and Inghams (70,379). WeSki was founded in 2016. Inghams in 1934.
2. Search traffic and scale don't line up.
Scott Dunn sits 13th on ATOL capacity (10,162) but pulls an estimated 158,400 organic visits a month, second only to Crystal (234,900). WeSki, second on ATOL, gets around 19,100. Ski Club Freshtracks has just 655 ATOL places and 47,900 estimated visits. Brand, content and backlinks clearly count for a lot.
3. Heritage is still at the top.
Equity (1933), Inghams (1934) and Club Med (1950) are the oldest brands on the board. Club Med also has the strongest Domain Rating, at 61.
The caveats matter, so they're on the page: ATOL capacity is authorised places, not bookings, and mixed operators include non-ski holidays. Search traffic is an Ahrefs estimate, and seasonal. Each profile shows its source and the date checked.
A Snowbistro tradition, continued
In September 2014 I published a comparison of UK snowsport website traffic here on Snowbistro. That one used Similarweb total visits, today's uses Ahrefs organic estimates, so don't read them as like-for-like growth. Still fun to look back on.
107 suppliers, one directory
Alongside the board there's a free supplier directory: 107 businesses across ski rental, instructors, transfers, software, recruitment, insurance, marketing and chalet hospitality.
If you're a supplier and you're not on it, get listed free.
Over to you
Who's missing from the operators board? And what else would you find useful to compare? Just hit reply, I read everything.
Still focused on helping the ski industry, now from my home in Slovakia's High Tatras.
Richard
Founder, Snowbistro
P.S. If you want to hear what skiing is like out here, I talked about the High Tatras with Iain Martin on The Ski Podcast.