Customer Reviews

The Blue Book of European Ski Resorts

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

We planned our entire European ski vacation, including airline ticket packages, with The Blue Book. It saved us a tremendous amount of time and frustration. It is easy to read and has all the good information we wanted to know. Best of all it is small enough to carry around so we could take it traveling with us.

I can't imagine anyone using this book to choose a place to ski or to plan a trip. It has lots of data, but no flavor. You can get much better info from web sites themselves. A much better book is Ski Europe, by Charles Leocha, which in turn however is not as good as an out of print and out of date book called Abby Rand's Ski Guide to Europe. The book Good Skiing and Snowboarding Guide 1999 has more valuable info including trail maps, (although, in that book very few hotels and restaurants in each area are specified). Frankly, a great European ski travel guide has not been written recently, that I have found.

As a long time reader of The Blue Book of European Ski Resorts, I take exception to the reviewers comments that the book has no flavor. Publisher Robert Enzel, who I have known for some time, puts out both the White Book of Ski Areas, and The Blue Book, and both, to my knowledge, are meant to be books with facts of the ski areas mentioned, not romance or travel pieces. In short, all one needs to know about the vertical ski terrain, number of lifts and updated information on lift ticket prices, and such, are there for the reader. And Enzel's books cover the widest range of areas...The books do exactly what they are designed and written to do, lay down the raw facts so skiers planning a trip know what to expect. Of course this can be supplemented by going into a particular website if needed for flavor and other background. Ted Heck, who spearheads The Blue Book, also has a timely and informative website with OnTheSnow.Com wherein he does a great job putting in all the flavor and atmosphere of his favorite European ski areas, from Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and several other countries.Few ski writers know as much about European resorts as Heck.

This book has section on Euro travel tips, and a couple pages summary on each country, as well as list of Web addresses, and lift ticket prices. Bulk of the book is a half-page overview on each of a couple hundred of the top resorts, organized by country. For better or worse, the information is just objective facts and statistics, without the subjective commentaries and advice that would be truely useful to skiers who don't have a clue about the differences between the many European resorts.

Also, the book is sponsored by Swissair and a French ski company. So--- surprise--- the chapters are constantly plugging Swissair and that French outfit. All in all I found it useful, and helpful in planning my European ski trip; on the downside it contains a lot of fluff and little or no real critiques of the many resort choices in Europe.