skideals.com

Review by Adrian Mann, owner of Adrian Mann Design, providing independent reviews and analysis of travel web sites in the UK.

With the winter holiday season upon us once more, it’s time to have a look at a few web sites catering for skiers and snowboarders. This week, we’ll be looking at Skideals.com, which is part of The World of TUI – the UK’s No.1 holiday company.

Overall
A great looking site, which loads in about 30 seconds using a 56kb modem – not bad considering the amount of images used to construct the pages. Many ski sites have a complex or confusing homepage, but Skideals have managed to organise the page in a clear and logical fashion. The colour scheme is predominantly chilly blues, with orange accents, with a few decent quality photos here and there.

Content
The site has four categories of holidays on offer; beginners, intermediate, advanced and snowboard. There are also links to sections on resorts, snow reports, insurance and a search engine. There are also many offers shown on the home page, which can be viewed by clicking on the price.
Clicking on one of the four categories brings a page of offers, which are divided into self-catering, half board and catered chalet accommodation. Click on one of the offers to see the details, which are quite basic – just the date, destination, duration, accommodation type and price. There’s no online booking facility, so booking is done over the phone, or you can email them with a request for more details. Each of the offers can be sent to friends by email, or a mobile phone text message. This is a great service – just enter your name and the number of the phone to send the message to, and a text message arrives almost immediately. All four categories follow the same format, and it’s very quick and easy to use.
If you can’t immediately see anything of interest, you can try a Search. This is restricted to Thomson or Crystal offers, but only requires a range of departure dates, destination, duration and maximum price. The destination list is comprehensive, but it’s all in CAPITALS and looks like it’s shouting! Results are returned very quickly, but with only 8 offers per page, it’s possible to have results running to over 65 pages! The limited number of options on the search page means there’s little opportunity to refine the search and limit the number of results to something more manageable.
‘Resorts’ offers guides to all the most popular destinations, arranged by country – unlike the destination list in the Search facility. There’s a brief description of the resort including Apres Ski and activities, a photo, a selection of ski facts, such as length of pistes, star ratings, lifts, restaurants and information from the World Snowboard Guide 2002. Most resorts also have piste maps that appear in a pop-up window. Although they look good, they are a bit small for anything practical.
Snow reports weren’t functioning at the time of review, but they promise up-to-date reports and web cams when the season starts. Until the snow falls, you can admire a picture of a cow in a flowery field!
‘Insurance’ provides a summary of the policies on offer, and the levels of cover provided. There are also links to the usual terms and conditions, contact details and other TUI sites.

Summary
Not the most detailed or comprehensive ski site by any means, but it will probably serve the needs of the majority of people looking for a ski or snowboard holiday. It’s well organised and laid out, and the decision to divide the offers into four ranges works well, though there may be the temptation to overestimate ones’ ability.
It’s not devoid of problems though. I missed a link from the offers to the resort description, and the area in the centre of the page that displays all the important information seems rather small, particularly for the resort descriptions and search results. However, there were no broken links or missing images, pages were delivered quickly, and the whole site has a consistent look and feel throughout.
When the season starts and the snow reports are active, I expect this site to be amongst the most popular for those looking for winter holidays.