How to Use Seasoned.info: A Full Tour of the Site

Most ski-resort comparison sites are built for holidaymakers choosing where to spend a week. Seasoned.info is built for the opposite: people deciding where to live and work for four to six months. That single difference shapes every tool on the site — what we measure, how we rank it and how the tools fit together.

Here's the full tour, and a suggested order for using it.

The resort database and resort pages

At the core of the site is a database of 250+ ski resorts worldwide, each with its own page at /resorts/[resort]. A resort page pulls together the stats that matter to a seasonaire — skiable area, vertical, season length, average snowfall, cost of living, rent, airport distance, the price of a beer and more.

What makes these pages different from every other resort comparison site is the stats we've chosen to track. We focus on the things that matter when you're living somewhere for four to six months, not visiting for a week — average monthly rent, typical grocery costs, estimated seasonaire salaries, season length (which directly determines your earning window), terrain variety and snowfall reliability. As more seasonaires leave reviews, these pages pull in real human data: actual pay figures, honest takes on accommodation and what it's really like to live and work there for a season. You get a mix of hard stats shown as percentiles (so you can see how a resort compares to the full database) and real feedback from people who've actually done a season there.

The Seasoned Score

Every resort with enough data gets a Seasoned Score out of 100 — a single composite number that ranks resorts from a working-season perspective. It weights the things that matter over a long stay (affordability, terrain size, season length, snowfall) far more heavily than a tourist ranking would.

The score is deliberately transparent: the full weighting is published on the how we score page and in the write-up of how the Seasoned Score works. It's a starting point for narrowing hundreds of resorts to a shortlist — not the final word.

The default weighting works well for most people, but everyone's priorities are different. If you're signed in, you can adjust the weightings entirely to match your own situation under Resort preferences in your account. A seasoned skier who only cares about gnarly terrain and deep snow and doesn't need to worry about budget will end up with a completely different shortlist than a first-time seasonaire on a tight budget who needs a beginner-friendly mountain with a strong expat community — and the personalised score reflects that.

The leaderboards

If you care about one specific thing, the leaderboards rank every resort on a single stat. There are fourteen of them, including:

• Highest Seasoned Score — best overall for a season
• Longest Seasons — most days open, directly tied to your earning window
• Most Skiable Terrain — biggest mountains, so you don't ski them out by March
• Cheapest Rent and Cheapest Beer — the two best proxies for cost of living
• Highest Average Salary — estimated net monthly pay for entry-level roles
• Gnarliest Terrain, Best for Beginners, Best Backcountry Access, Best for Carvers — terrain profiles for different kinds of skiers
• Best Snowfall, Biggest Vertical, Best Nightlife, Closest Airport — the shortest transfer from an international airport to the resort

Each leaderboard shows where a resort sits relative to the rest of the field, so you're never looking at a number in isolation.

The resort finder quiz

The leaderboards rank on one stat at a time and the Seasoned Score uses one fixed set of weights. The resort finder quiz is for when your priorities are your own. You answer a handful of questions about what matters to you — price, snow, terrain, nightlife, gnarliness, backcountry, airport proximity — and the site re-ranks all 250+ resorts using your weighting instead of the default.

It's the same scoring engine as the Seasoned Score, just run with your numbers rather than ours. If you want the full detail of how that works, see how the resort finder quiz works.

The comparison tool

Once you've narrowed things down, the comparison tool puts up to 3 resorts side by side across every stat. This is the stage where you stop ranking and start deciding: seeing Morzine, Verbier and Val Thorens in three columns makes the trade-offs — cheaper rent versus bigger terrain versus longer season — obvious in a way a ranked list can't.

The visa tools

None of the above matters if you can't legally work where you want to go. Two tools cover that:

• The visa eligibility checker takes your nationality and age and instantly shows which countries you can legally work a ski season in — including which schemes (working holiday, seasonal-worker permits, freedom of movement) apply to you.
• The visa guides go country-by-country in depth, covering the full range of routes into a season — not just working-holiday visas — and are checked against official government sources.

The knowledge base

The resources section is the written side of the site: destination guides, job advice, budgeting, kit lists, timelines and safety, organised into collections. If you're planning a season for the first time, the Essentials collection is the curated starting path — it covers everything from when to start applying, to what to pack, to how to handle tax and banking abroad.

Beyond Essentials, the collections go deep on the specific things that trip people up. The Jobs collection covers everything from where to look, to what contracts to watch out for, to how to negotiate accommodation as part of your package. The Timelines guides give you a month-by-month plan for each destination so you know when to apply, when to book flights and when to start stressing. The Kit collection goes well beyond a generic packing list — it's specifically built around what you actually need for a four-to-six month stint, not a week's holiday. And if you want to understand the day-to-day reality before you commit, the Life on Season guides cover the stuff that's hard to find anywhere else: what the social scene is really like, how staff accommodation works in practice and what to expect from your first few weeks. We also have guides on budgeting for a season, finding accommodation, and managing tax and visas — all written specifically for seasonaires rather than generic travel advice.

The assistant

There's a chat assistant on most pages (bottom-right). It answers questions using the site's own blog posts and visa guides first — so it stays focused on seasonaire topics rather than generic ski advice. When it can't find the answer in the knowledge base, it searches the web using Perplexity to find the most up-to-date information. If it still can't give a satisfying answer, the question gets logged so we can write the guide that was missing.

Seasonaire reviews

The reviews system is live and growing. Seasonaires can submit detailed ratings and written reviews of specific resorts, covering pay, rent, hours, accommodation quality and whether they'd go back. These aren't star ratings; they're structured feedback on the things that actually matter when you're living somewhere. As the volume of reviews grows, these real-world figures will start feeding into a future version of the Seasoned Score alongside our researched stats — making the rankings sharper and more grounded in what people actually experienced.

The more reviews come in, the more useful the site becomes — especially for smaller resorts where public data is thin. If you've done a season, leaving a review is the single most useful thing you can do for someone planning theirs. You can also like and comment on reviews you find helpful, or ask questions directly on resort pages — the community side of the site is still early but it's where things get interesting. (User-uploaded photos with the most likes will eventually become the main resort page image, so quality photos are welcome too.)

What's coming

The job board is the next big piece. The idea is straightforward but the execution matters: a board where ski resorts, chalets, hotels, ski schools and other seasonal employers can post verified openings, and where seasonaires can find real jobs rather than scraping Google or relying on word of mouth. For resorts it's a direct line to motivated, relevant candidates. For seasonaires it's a curated, ski-season-specific source rather than a generic job site where ski jobs are buried three pages deep.

Beyond that, the roadmap includes accommodation listings for staff chalets and seasonal rentals, and deeper resort profiles covering things like whether accommodation is provided, what the typical contract looks like and what past employees have said. The Seasoned Score will evolve too — as review data matures it will start incorporating real-world signals (actual pay, real rent figures from past seasonaires) rather than relying solely on publicly available stats.

If there's something you'd like to see on the site — a stat we're not tracking, a tool that would help you decide, a country we've missed in the visa guides — follow the links in the footer to suggest it. The site gets built in the direction the seasonaire community actually needs.

A suggested order

1. Take the quiz to get a personalised shortlist.
2. Check the visa tool to remove anywhere you can't legally work.
3. Read the resort pages for your shortlist to sanity-check the stats and read the area summaries.
4. Compare your final two or three side by side.
5. Dig into the job advice, packing guides, timelines and Essentials before you commit.

That's the whole site, in the order that turns "somewhere with snow" into a specific plan.