The Powderhounds website is amazing. I mainly ski in Japan (well not the last few years) and the website is great. Pretty much all the information posted has turned out to be true. Makes picking a place to ski or stay much easier.
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I just got back from 3 weeks exploring multiple ski resorts in Austria and the Sellaronda in Italy. I live near a major Colorado ski resort and have worked at two different resorts here so the skier lifestyle is very familiar. However, I'd never skied outside of North America and this site was extremely helpful in making decisions on where to hit next and what to expect while in a foreign country. I found all the reviews to be very helpful, mostly accurate, and aligned with my own priorities (skiing experience and value first and foremost, as well as accessibility via public transit.) I chose 5 different destination points during my travels (4 in Austria and one in the Dolomites), and each experience was fantastic. I'd gladly return to each one given the opportunity! I didn't use any booking or communication, so I can't speak to those services. I have a relative living in Germany and look forward to making another winter trip to visit her, and continue exploring European skiing with the aid of this site. Thanks for helping with my decision making processes!
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Hello!
Thank you for a good "all-around-the-world-resort-ski-guide". Unfortunately your rating system is not relevant and needs to be improved. The North American ski resort gets to many points compared with the European. Also, using a 5 grade scale is not enough to get fair separation. Hope you can improve the guide and make it more accurate.
Best wishes
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I have been reading this website for some years now and it has inspired some amazing ski goals for me. Our last two trips we planned following advice we found here and we are in the process of planning our third.
So far we haven´t actually booked anything through the website so I can´t speak to that, but all of the information and reviews found here have been extremely helpful and haven´t failed us yet!
Also, I have emailed with them and the communication was always excellent.
Keep up the good work!
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This is generally a helpful site but rather than repeat what others have written, I would like to start by making two suggestions and an observation for reflection.

Suggestion #1 - Please include the name of the writers who wrote each review. Or, if multiple writers contributed, please include the name of the writers after each paragraph/section they did. It would be helpful to know whose impressions we are reading in each review so that we can filter the review through what we know about that writer's biases. Everyone is biased of course, which is okay. However, knowing who wrote what can help us to get a better sense of what bias their opinions/suggestions are coming from.

Suggestion #2 - Please include the specific date the articles were written, or when they were most recently updated. Some of the information here is outdated. Knowing when the articles were written could help alert us to when we may need to do more up-to-date research.

One more observation I'd like to share is that given that there are many opinions in addition to the facts shared by the Powderhounds writers, it is important to take their impressions with a grain of salt. Living in Japan, I've noticed many of their generalisations about Japanese culture made in the official reviews to be typical of Western tourists who are in the country for a short time and experiencing it through rose-tinted tourist glasses. Many of the articles have a tendency to promote a fantasy about the "real" Japan, implying the presence of other races during their vacation to be a stain on their pure experience of Japan (though they themselves are in the country as tourists and admit to knowing little about the culture or language themselves).

I suspect they wouldn't apply the same thinking when visiting a country like the US or Canada, where there are many types of people forming the overall culture. It is strange to me how they wish Japan to remain racially pure to fit their fantasies, but I suspect they would never consider themselves to be anti-immigration or anti-diversity in their own countries. I wonder if they are aware of this contradiction in their thinking. Have they ever considered why much of Japan is racially homogenous, though it is a developed country with a declining population in need of more workers? It is because the people in Japan generally reject immigration and diversity, and typically prefer that most "foreigners" come only as tourists to spend their money and go back to their own countries quickly.

As someone living in Japan who is not racially Japanese, it can feel like a very unwelcoming place at times. Reading the Powderhounds writers supporting Japan's racial purity narrative for the purposes of their holiday fantasies is discouraging for people like myself. And though Japan is generally against immigration and doesn't admit many refugees (compared to the West), there is a small trickle of diversity in a few parts of the country. Does that mean that a district of Osaka that has some Japanese residents without 100% Japanese DNA is less of the "real" Japan than a small town in Hokkaido is, though all of these places have people living in Japan in them?

Related to this, I also noticed in number of the articles about Japanese ski areas that they basically condone skiing in restricted areas, with tips about "remaining invisible" or how willing the ski patrollers are to come after you. Personally, I agree that many Japanese ski resorts have outdated views about off-piste skiing and are often lacking in knowledge about how to manage off-piste and treed terrain. There are scant avalanche control measures taken by ski resorts in this country. However, indirectly telling people to disobey the rules of ski resorts isn't a great idea either. It would be better to add visible disclaimers when providing info about morally grey areas or breaking the ski resort rules.

On a more positive note, a few Japanese ski areas are beginning to come around to the idea that tree skiing and off-piste can be done safely if they manage it properly and make the risks known, which leads to more visitors. That brings me back to suggestion #2, to show a time stamp of when the Powderhounds reviews were written. In the past couple years, I can count at least a few resorts that have officially changed their tree-skiing policies or added some new tree runs, but which haven't been updated on this site.

Anyways, now that that's out of the way, I will echo what others have said about this site - it has been helpful to me on a number of occasions, particularly about which resorts are permissive of tree-skiing and off-piste, and to what degree. I've mostly used it in Japan but since I've skied in Europe and North America, I read some of the reviews for other places I've been and the basic info is generally valuable, though of course has many opinions from the writers - some of which I agree with, some not. Outside of Japan, I've noticed that the writers also tend to have a pro-European bias.

Since there are few English-language sites that review Japanese ski areas, I've recommended this site to a couple friends before. If the suggestions about including author names and time stamps, as well as considering a re-evaluation of the shortcomings of the cultural implications were implemented, then I honestly feel it would improve the experience for users around the globe much more.
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Your comments about vehicle access/costs in Aus are a little overstated as they depend on the number of people involved and your choice of car/bus etc. and whether weekly only. Conversely, you omit comment about the compulsory daily charge in NZ to get to the mountain - $20 -$40 - on top of lift tickets.

Editor's note: we are unaware of any compulsory daily charge in NZ to get to the mountains
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I have now snowboarded and splitboarded all over the world now and Powderhounds is always my starting point! You can find out all the information from which countries to see, which resorts are best and how to get to them, as well as links for well-established tour companies and tons of tips on various ways of accessing the goods. Rather than spending your limited time off work and your hard earned money going across the world only to find out all the good mountains are in a different part of the country or that your hotel is actually an hour from the resort and they offer no shuttles, just cut out the guess work and let Powderhounds show you the way!

Thanks PH keep it comin!!
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Excellent web site !
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Best website out there for ski research. So much insight on almost every resort in the world. Their reviews are always spot on and I trust them every time when determining where to plan my next major ski trip. So dope, keep up the great work. Would love to see your guys opinions on some east coast resorts, let me know if you need some help. #skitheeast
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U guys put so much info on that site that is insane... There is no one like U on the web... Just please don't get lazy...
Best *****/5
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