Mon, 01/18/2010 - 6:34pmThe Great Rental Rip-Off

Rental is one of the backbones of the British Ski Holiday, and gives anyone the chance to see if they like skiing without investing in the kit

But when you find yourself looking at lower quality kit and restricted choice, with a weak pound in your pocket, it’s time to consider if renting is really the way to go

Almost every sport now offers rental: windsurfing, sailing, cycling, motorcycling – arrive at your destination, pick up some kit and off you go. For anyone learning or building confidence, it’s a chance to get to grips with a sport without an outlay in gear they may not use again. As such, we salute it; how else are we going to attract new blood and reveal the wonders of skiing to the unsuspecting world?

Once you know you like something, it’s time to invest. Tens of thousands of people take up sailing on weeklong holidays every year. Many thousands of them then go on to buy their own boat so they can progress at their own pace; some go on to race, others to cruise, many just to potter about at their local club, or on coastal holidays. For the amount of sailing they do, it’s questionable whether the faff of ownership is valid. But the consistency of the experience, the freedom to go whenever they please and the ability to develop their skills from a known base add a certainty to their sailing that being in the rental pool would never allow.

But it’s got the same name as the ski in the shop?

There is one key difference between sailing and skiing: when you rent sailing gear it’s almost certainly the same as the boat you’d buy; with skis, they aren’t. Every big manufacturer produces rental lines of their popular production skis. For beginners’ models they make no bones about it; you’ll find scuff-resistant topsheets, rubber bumpers on the ends to protect both the skiers and the skis, and thick bases and edges to allow for frequent trips through the grinding machine without much love. After all, if you’ve got to service 400 skis overnight before the next group arrive you won’t be checking the final finish on every one.

So that’s beginner level: bum basic, but they bend in roughly the right place and if you can wobble down a slope you’ll be past these in a week. On to something that looks like a pair of ‘real’ skis. Ones you see for sale in the shop. Maybe the Silver or Intermediate category in the list. You’ll be paying between £70-£90 for these for six days. Shame that they’ve got the same thick bases, the same thick edges, the same basic bindings and are run through the same machines with the same amount of care. Sure, they look like £300-£400 skis, but the factory produces special runs of rental gear (200 is a minimum order, in case you need some) with everything the high-volume in-resort store needs to process punters. They cost these stores about fifty quid and they’re sold off after two seasons – around 20 weeks’ rental (which is enough to trash any pair of skis, however mincingly used) – for about £200. Nice deal. But not for whoever buys them.

What about the top end rentals?

Ah, but ‘Advanced’ or ‘Gold’ or ‘Premium’ skis could never be rental specials, could they? Well, according to the catalogues we pick up at trade shows, they are. The bindings might be retail standard because so many come on rail systems now and it’s easier (read ‘cheaper’) to make one sort of ski/binding combo. The topsheets will probably be scratch resistant. The bases are generally thicker. The edges are thicker or made from different material. They still go through the same machine as the others – you don’t really think there’s a ‘special’ machine for ‘special’ skis, do you? This adds up to a ski that does not feel or ski like a retail model. More importantly, it won’t feel or ski just like that last rental ski you picked up, even if it was the same model from the same shop.

Are there any good guys?

Rental is huge business, and because of this it loses the personal touches we like to see in our specialist sports. There are some shops and some operators who make a big effort to provide retail-spec skis which are prepped to a decent spec and give you a good chance to see what these skis are really like. Ski Republic in Paradiski (www.ski-republic.com), for example, have a decent selection of current model gear. Much of it does have rental bindings on, but we can forgive them that for the in-chalet fitting and readiness to change skis throughout the holiday.

Another new idea is from Edge 2 Edge (www.edge2edge.co.uk), who have been renting out skis from the UK to be collected at airports. From this season you can drop into their stores to get fitted up, and then the skis and boots are delivered to your holiday accommodation. Pricing is in sterling, and works out cheaper than renting in resort. All the skis are sold off at the end of the season after about seven weeks’ use, so you’re getting current high-spec gear which is picked at the same ski test Fall-Line uses to build its test results. Anyone who likes the skis enough to buy a pair on their return can get the rental fee back.

Try before you buy is a sound idea but it’s only recently that we could do this in the UK. Ellis Brigham and Snow+Rock have big demo pools at their stores under the UK’s real snow slopes and will give you the money back off your snow time if you buy hardware off them.

But dragging your own kit around is such an effort!

Ownership is all about consistency and development, where rental is about ease and simplicity. So now let’s make the case for the ease of not renting. Heading out to the slopes with your gear will cost you about £40. When you arrive, you’re set. No fitting, queuing or concerns that you haven’t got the right kit. If you’re riding a pair of all-mountain skis you’ll know that whatever is happening outside the window, you’re ready for it. If you’re a piste monster, that edge and wax you gave your skis before the trip are about to pay you back, big time. Your boots are bedded in; your bindings are set to a level you’re comfortable with. If you’ve had your skis set up by your local UK store you might have taken the time to see how to set bindings up yourself, so you can tweak them to the conditions. Many unscrupulous rental outfits won’t have very highly trained staff, so it makes sense to learn what you can about what suits you.
Next you could find out how to edge your skis, wax 'em and repair dings. You’ll be better connected in every sense once you start taking an interest in the planks under your feet, which make so much difference to a few weeks of your year.

 

What is the cost of renting in the Alps?

Many companies allow online advance booking. This should be a good thing, because you know what you’re getting; in reality most of the big companies won’t guarantee a model of ski. To hire £500+ UK-priced skis as we went to press with Fall-Line issue 85 was between £92-£105 in France. Mid-range all-mountain skis, costing around £430 with bindings in the UK, are £78 or £90 if you want the option to try different pairs during the week. To add boots on top would cost an additional £25.
With Crystal, in Tignes, cost of Gold skis is £108 for six days and £38 for boots, making them the most expensive option.
 

The cost of ownership

This is a mix of up-front spend, travel and maintenance. This year’s Fall-Line Ski of the Year is the K2 Kung Fujas, which, with a binding, will cost you £500. Let’s buy a pair. You need a bag – £20. You need poles at £30. You need to get them out to the mountains – and extra £37 with easyJet.
What a great week, shame about the ding in the base… £30 later and they’re repaired, waxed and serviced, ready for a long weekend in March. Cost for this is £37, plus a £15 service. Call it £52 a trip. You’ll use these skis for the next 10 trips, at least. Seasonnaires reckon on getting up to 16 weeks of hard use out of a pair, so we’re being kind.

But maybe you want to rent a pair of the Kung Fujas? Ah, well, if you go to almost any rental outfit in the Alps, you can’t, because they don’t stock American brands. You might get Salomon Shoguns but they’re more likely to be Salomon Tornados in France, Atomic Nomad Blackeyes in Austria and Scott Crusades in Switzerland. All fine skis. They’ll cost you about £105 per six days to rent, including insurance. That’s twice the price of carrying and servicing your own skis; over 10 trips it works out at exactly the same. Every trip after that and you’re £50 up, not allowing for inflation of rental, travel or servicing which historically track level over a five-year period.

The poles, bag and bindings carry over to your next pair of skis. Most brands now produce bindings which swap between skis by simply undoing a couple of screws – we’ve done it up on the hill when testing before now.
 

Why rental is so huge

Manufacturers use rental to both keep the wheels of industry turning and to get their name out there. Volume and market share: the gods of big business at the expense of profitability and common sense…

The manufacturers want their expensive factories to be churning out skis for as much of the year as possible. Since the raw material cost for a ski is tiny, as is the cost of the energy needed to produce it and the wages needed to see each one through the line, it makes sense to keep those presses pressing. Because it’s a seasonal business and most retail models change at least the graphics each season, you need these produced as early as possible and into shops to get them sold through before they become last year’s news.

Now, if you’ve bought heaps of materials to get the best deal, and have an eager sales team out there courting the giant buying groups who will take huge volumes of skis but at a very, very good price, the best thing is to keep on producing, even at a microscopic profit. Because, after all, profit is profit. And even if it isn’t actually profit, you have more skis than the next guy on retail and rental racks and appearing to be absolutely fricking massive is almost as good as being a stable, well-managed company. Well, it is until suddenly no-one wants all the over-production and you’re left with either a lot of ski-making material which you can use up slowly or, far worse, a giant pile of last year’s skis.

These can, of course, go into rental at a giveaway price. Which is exactly what happened two years ago. Over-production had got to such a state that we were seeing skis spewing out of leaks in the system all over the place. Huge German warehouses buying up tens of thousands of pairs and dumping them on the global market, a bit like TKMaxx but specialised. Rental companies appeared with 2-for-1 deals and decent kit a couple of seasons ago and suddenly the retailers were worried, and rightly so.

At the higher end, skiers expect a wide choice of different skis – putting this in place and keeping them in acceptable condition costs more than many places are prepared to put up with, but if the skis themselves are ridiculously cheap it makes sense. But now they aren’t cheap, and the marketing ploys to get people renting at the top end have to be cranked up because the price difference between rental and buying is looking less clear.

The reason for this sudden glut of rental companies appearing in the UK is because of the reason outlined above, and also because going online means the in-resort companies can get a bigger slice of the pie. Tour operators direct thousands of renters to these stores, but take around a 50% cut of the deal. These stores therefore have a lot of margin to hijack the renters before they get into resort, hence 2-for-1 deals and the rest. If they can beat the tour ops to the skier before they leave the UK, they make more money.
 

 

Boot hire

After your first trip you’d have to be mad to hire someone else’s stinky old boots. Decent boots cost about £250, including a custom fitting, don’t cost extra to fly with and will last you at least one season of solid skiing, or about eight years if you ski twice a year. There are the odd worries about plastic degrading – if you leave your boots in the sun all year then yes, they’ll degrade. Most people we know stick them in the loft or the cupboard under the stairs, in which case they’ll last 10 years no problem. The liners might go hard, but it’s unlikely.

The painful facts: Cost to rent stinky boots – £38 per week. Cost of painful boots, irritation of returning, lost hours on the slopes etc etc etc… Let’s not go there.
Final word: If you don’t own your own boots you’re not a skier.

 

Rental myth

“It doesn’t matter if the snow’s crap because they’re only rental skis.” Ah, but it does. We’ve heard of a dozen cases last season where people ended up forced into buying their rental skis because they’d damaged the bases. We got a look at a couple of these skis and there was no way we’d have written them off. Moved them into the reserve squad after 30 quid’s worth of base repair, maybe, but not beyond economic repair by a long shot. It’s a scam and you’ve nothing to do apart from cough up the cash. It always feels bad paying £300 for half-shot skis with crap rental bindings and a big hole in the base. We’ve been there. At least if you’d trashed your own skis you could have used the bindings on your next pair…