The four questions hiding inside 'is it open?'
We break opening status into four signals because conflating them causes every misunderstanding skiers have about live ski data:
- Season status — is the resort within its published winter season window?
- Operational status — are lifts spinning today (not closed for high wind / no staff)?
- Terrain status — what percentage of pistes is groomed and skiable?
- Time-of-day status — for indoor centres and night-skiing resorts, what are today's opening hours?
Season opening and closing dates
We keep an explicit season start/end date for every resort in our catalogue, sourced from the resort's own announcement and verified against the previous season.
These dates only auto-update when the current season's end date has already passed — so a January edit cannot accidentally shift the same-season closing date.
Indoor ski centres are different — and we treat them differently
SnowWorld, Ski Dubai, Chill Factore and the other ~30 indoor centres do not have a 'season.' They have opening hours. Snow depth is also meaningless indoors.
On indoor resort pages we replace snow depth and season dates with today's opening hours, and we exclude indoor centres from weather and snow forecast updates entirely.
Why we do not (yet) show every individual lift
Per-lift live status exists in some markets (Skistar, Vail Epic, Alterra) but is not standardised across the 1,200 resorts we cover. Showing it for 12 resorts and not the rest would be misleading.
When per-lift status exists for a resort, we link out to the resort's own live lift map from the resort detail page rather than re-publishing partial data.
Frequently asked questions
Do you show real-time individual lift status?
Not yet, because the data is only available for a minority of resorts and presenting it inconsistently across 1,200 resorts would mislead more skiers than it helped. We link out to each resort's official live lift map where one exists.
How quickly do season opening dates update?
We auto-update season dates only when the previous season's end date has already passed. That avoids accidental in-season shifts and means published dates always reflect the most recent confirmed season announcement.
Why do indoor resorts show opening hours instead of snow depth?
Indoor centres maintain a constant snow surface, so depth is not a useful comparison metric. Today's opening hours are the actually-useful number, so that is what we publish.