Hey friends,
I’m just finalising prices for the 2027 season. The new prices are up on our website. For those who’ve already been in touch to plan trips, I’ll be in touch over the next few days to confirm dates and finalise your bookings.
For those yet to reach out, we’ve already got quite solid bookings through peak period (mid Jan to mid Feb) but we’re bringing on a third guide this season so we have more availability and still have dates free throughout the season (more on that below).
A note about pricing for 2027. Two important things: We’re now charging in Japanese Yen, and prices are going up. I come from a ski bum background, so I always feel very self-conscious about charging more for skiing. Perhaps just to reassure myself(?) I thought I’d say about about the changes here:
Now that we have a company, a house, and vehicles in Japan the bulk of our expenses are in yen. Also the yen is abnormally weak right now. I’m not a currency market expert but it’s really far from what would have been a stardard exchange rate just a year ago and with all this volatility if we continue to charge in AUD we either have to price in a huge risk buffer or we are exposed in the exchange rate continues to change. So we’re charging in Yen. You’ll also have the option to pay in USD, Euros, AUD, or NZD via bank transfer using the current exchange rate.
Running a Japanese company is absurdly expensive. We have to pay for a quite a bit of translation support and most of our overheads have more than doubled (our accountant in Japan charges 5 times what our Australian accountant charges). It’s wild. Unfortunately we have to recover those costs.
Everything is more expensive. Both for the company, and for our guides. We’re serious about guiding, but that means it has to pay a wage we can build our lives on. Paying more for guides gets you better quality guides who deliver better and safer skiing.
The advantage for paying more is that using a Japanese company gives us the stability and predictability to expand the operation. That means more guides, more redundancy, more support in case of a serious incident, and more people contributing to data collection and decision making around avalanche risk.
We’re planning to run three guides this season, as well as a “winter intern” whose job is mostly to go skiing and have a good time but who is available to respond if we need help or logistical support. Having two guides last year made it much easier to stay current on conditions across multiple zones and added an invaluable second pair of eyes to our risk management systems.
2027 is one of the pinch points as the company grows - we’ve got all the additional costs of scaling up but don’t yet have all the additional benefits, plus we’re servicing a (very modest) loan that paid for the house. I’m really hopeful that putting up prices this season will mean that we don’t need to make significant price increases for the foreseeable future.
Most of you are not coming from a ski bum background and hopefully these increases are comfortably within your budgets, but sometimes the financial muscle-memory of scraping through back-to-back winters is hard to shake. I really do try to keep these trips reasonably and fairly priced. I hope they’re worth every cent (now Yen).