Industry News
People can get pretty passionate about their favorite ski resort, and Australians are no exception. Statements like “Oh, Hotham is where all the serious skiers are at!” or “Well, I’m a Thredbo-person” are uttered with a sense of pride. If you have not been initiated into Australian skiing, it can be very confusing. Everyone naturally has their favorite ski resort and every ski resorts has its perks. Therefore SnowBrains wanted to take emotions out of the equation and simply compare Australian resorts on a numerical basis so that everyone can make up their own mind on which resort they would prefer to visit. In order to keep the comparison fair, all resort data has been taken from one source, SkiResort.Info.
Australian Ski Resorts by Size of Ski Area
The title of biggest Australian resort goes hands-down to Perisher. There are not really that many more ways to skin the proverbial cat than to compare skiable areas or kilometers of runs. Skiable area is a metric used in North America while kilometer of groomed runs is a metric used in European resorts. To give a neutral perspective, we have compared Australian resorts with both metrics. Perisher is the largest resort using either category. At 3,076 acres (1,245 hectares), Perisher offers more than twice the skiable area to second ranked Thredbo with 1,186 acres (480 hectares).
When it comes to skiable kilometers, Perisher leads by a smaller margin, with a total of 65 km (41 miles) of groomed runs versus Thredbo’s 52 km (33 miles). While it may come as a surprise that the amount of kilometers of runs is not considerably more at Perisher, this is due to two factors. For one, runs at Perisher are fact that the resort only counts runs it grooms towards this number. Perisher has a considerable range of skiable area that is not groomed or marked as runs as such, yet are skiable. German resort expert Christoph Schrahe, founder of Montenius, a company that consults to ski resorts across the globe, estimates Perisher’s ski kilometers to be 99km which is almost double that of Thredbo and much more in line with the proportional relationship of the skiable area of the two resorts. Schrahe’s consulting company Montenius independently verifies the length of ski runs across the globe, but for the sake of neutrality, we are not using Schrahe’s kilometers for Perisher in the graph.
Australian Ski Resorts by Elevation/Vertical
Since size isn’t the only thing that matters in life, we have next looked at the elevation and vertical Australian resorts offer. When considering peak elevation and vertical, we have only taken into account the highest lifted point in a resort.
Regarding elevation, Thredbo takes the Perisher’s number 1 spot by a 3 meter-(10 feet) margin. However, keep in mind, Thredbo will lose the title of highest lifted point in Australia to Perisher in 2025 when the new Mount Perisher Six-Chair is completed.
In terms of vertical, Thredbo smashes Perisher. With 672 meters (2,205 feet) of vertical, Thredbo reigns supreme in Australia. In fact, Thredbo flies past Perisher, but Buller and Hotham also. Buller and Hotham offer 400 meters (1,312 feet) and 395 meters (1,296 feet) vertical respectively, while Perisher is demoted to fourth place with only 355 meters (1,165 feet) of vertical.
Australian Resorts by Lift Infrastructure
When it comes to lift infrastructure, Perisher edges back into first place with 48 lifts servicing the resort, giving a total capacity of 55,008 people per hour. In fact, Buller beats Thredbo in number of ski lifts inching into second place with 20 lifts ahead of Thredbo’s 15.
Regarding hourly lift capacity, Thredbo comes in fifth place, the last place of the big five resorts in Australia. While this may be surprising, it is also important to consider that not all hourly capactiy is created equal. A small conveour that covers 5 meters of vertical might have the same hourly capacity of 2,000 pax as a chair lift that covers several hundred meters of vertical but the two lifts are hardly the same. To overcome this discrepancy, Schrahe created a metric he calls “VTM”, or Vertical Transport Capacity in Meters. To calculate the VTM of a resort, you multiply the hourly of each lift in a resort with the vertical each lift covers. To better understand if Thredbo’s lift capacity is truly that far behind, I calculated the VTM for Thredbo and for Buller. Thredbo has a VTM of 5,316,444 which is much closer to Mount Buller’s VTM is 5,378,400.
We hope you have found this analysis interesting and possibly helpful if you are unsure where to ski or board this season. Each resort in Australia naturally has qualitative factors that no number crunching can capture and that are also often up to individual preferences. Every resort has its special charms that cannot be reduced to numbers so everyone will have their favorite due to a multitude of factors and rightly so. Life would be boring if we all were the same and preferred the same things.
