Ski & Snowboard Rental

Sixty years ago, skiing was a very exclusive club, enjoyed mainly by the very rich and those lucky enough to live and work in the mountains. Then along came the package holiday. Suddenly skiing opened up to a much wider market and ski rental boomed. Every resort across the Alps boasted a dozen or more ski shops, all inundated with customers. Demand was high, allowing them to turn tidy profits. Your average ski shop could earn back the cost of buying in ski equipment over just one or two weeks of rental, but to boost profits further, it wasn’t unusual for them to hang on to ski’s for several years to rinse out as many Francs as they could.

Then two things changed. The internet arrived into peoples homes and budget airlines started offering flights to winter ski destinations. It was now entirely feasible to arrange your own flights, transfers and accommodation for a similar price to that of a package holiday company. Suddenly you were no longer tied into using the ski hire shop that gave your tour operator the best kick back and alongside that, the average consumer was much more tech savvy. They knew which ski brands they liked, what skis were new this season, which were four years old and what an unwaxed base looked like!

Into this void stepped a new breed of ski hire company, one that offered better equipment, better service and all at a much fairer price.

Kieran Hicks set up Tignes Spirit back in 2005. A regular visitor to Tignes throughout the late 90’s, he noticed a gap opening up in the market, and particularly a lack of decent snowboard equipment available for rental. Soon after he introduced to Tignes what was a very new concept at the time – ski/snowboard rental equipment delivered to your chalet on arrival! The Tignes Spirit brand has continued to grow over the last ten years and has become an iconic name in the resort. Kieran now has a fully fledged shop in Tignes Lavachet (they still offer delivery to Tignes, Val d’Isere and Ste. Foy). Their knowledgable and very approachable staff are on hand to help you choose the right equipment and get the right fit and they also sell everything else you could possibly need in the mountains.

Rental Republic is a company that really took the ski delivery concept and ran with it. From their distribution centres, they are able to offer ski and snowboard equipment delivery to over 50 of the biggest ski resorts in the world! Paradiski (Les Arcs and La Plagne) is their home turf but they now cover La Rosiere, Ste. Foy, Espace Killy, the Three Valleys and the USA, most recently adding Chamonix to the list. Owner Paul Coyle set the business up back in 2010 having previously run a chalet with his wife Jo in La Plagne called Riders Republic. Again, it was a case of noticing a gap opening up in the local market that lead Paul move away from chalet holidays and specialise in ski hire.

New players in the market such as Tignes Spirit and Rental Republic certainly made the more established brands sit up and take notice. Intersport has come a long way in the past few years and these days stock a wide range of quality equipment. Their shop in Plagne Bellecote is fine case in point. Owned by Ingrid Lafforgue (1970 slalom World Champion) and now run by her sons Cedric (an Olympian) and Julien (who also shapes skis for Black Crows!) they stock all the regular stuff you might expect but also a wide range of back country touring skis, from lightweight Volkl’s (for those who want to explore quickly and for whom going uphill is of most importance) through to the wider Black Crows with more progressive bindings such as the Salomon S Lab or Marker Shift MCN 13 Bindings which are touring set ups but with a downhill focus. They also rent airbags, transcievers, probes, shovels etc – basically the full set up. And because it’s part of the rental stock, you can swap and change so taking a touring set up out of the shop is just as easy as swapping from some all-mountain skis to some carving skis (which they always encourage customers to do – why not have your own ski test!). They also offer splitboard hire and like most Intersport shops, stock the Nitro Q series which includes some interesting shaped snowboards such as fish and swallow tails for those deep days!

With so much now available for rental, at such reasonable prices it really does beg the question “Do I really need to own ski gear?”. Ok, maybe there’s a case to argue where boots are concerned and getting the right fit is important but your own ski’s or snowboard? We think not.

Basic ski hire can cost as little as £100 for one week (intermediate package). EasyJet charge £74 return for ski carriage so for just £26 extra your saving yourself the drama of having to carry your skis through the airport, checking them in at oversize baggage and that nervous wait for them to arrive at the other end after all the other cases have been unloaded! A set of intermediate ski’s (let’s face it, no one buys a beginners package!) with bindings will cost you at least £300. The average person who skis one week a year would need to use the same skis for eleven and a half years before the cost of buying balances the cost of renting! That’s eleven years of carting a ski bag around through airports. In fact during that time you probably wore out your ski bag too. Call it twelve years! With renting you can have the latest skis every single year.

Then there’s the environmental cost. Simply owning a pair of skis carries the carbon footprint of production versus “sharing” hire ski’s with other consumers. Then there’s the additional cost of transporting your skis. As we are all acutely aware these days, flying is one of the big contributors to climate change. That means every additional kg carried on an aeroplane brings an additional CO2 burden. Same goes to a lesser extent when it comes to transport to and from the airport which segue’s neatly into another incentive! Since 2016 we have been offering CO2 emission free airport transfers using our small fleet of Tesla Model X’s. When booking with Cool Bus you can pay just 10% extra on top of the cost of a regular transfer to ensure an electric ride but if you are travelling in a group of four or less without skis, there’s a good chance you will find yourself getting upgraded for free. As if you needed another reason!