We picked our ski week on the TV, with the whole family
By Akos Orban, . I'm the developer of My Next Adventure, the trip planner this was done in. It's free to try.
This year's ski week started as a list of 28 apartments around the Sella Ronda, in five villages, with prices from 3,500 to 9,500 PLN (roughly €800 to €2,150). I had done the research. My wife and the kids (10 and 7) had not, and they were the ones who had to live with the result.
My first attempt at sharing it was the obvious one: tables in a chat, then a link to the plan. Neither worked. A table with 28 rows tells you nothing about where a place is, and nobody sits down with someone else's planning tool for fun.
What worked was putting it on the TV.
What was on the screen
A map of the valley with the real pistes and lifts drawn on it, coloured blue, red and black, and each apartment as a pin with its price. Pick an apartment and the map shows the walk to the nearest lift as an actual route, with the minutes.
That last part changed the shortlist on its own. One listing said the lift was 150 m away, and the route came out as a 10 minute walk. Our eventual pick was described by the owner as 3 to 4 minutes from the gondola. The route says 7. Still fine, but good to know before carrying four pairs of skis.
How we decided
That evening I ran it from my laptop and cast it to the TV. Since then the phone has become the remote, so nobody has to sit at a computer. Either way, everyone else just looks at the TV.
- Star the ones somebody likes.
- Cross off the ones nobody wants. They can be brought back if someone changes their mind.
- Compare puts the starred ones side by side: photos, price, bedrooms, distance to the lift, whether you can ski back.
The question that decided it was one I would not have guessed: can the kids ski back to the door at the end of the day? Around Canazei there is one run back to the village that they can manage, a red. In Campitello you take the cable car down, and the run down to Alba is a black. On a map with the pistes drawn in, you see that in a few seconds. In a table you don't see it at all.
We took a two bedroom apartment in Canazei, about 100 m from where that red run ends, for €1,414 for the week. The deposit went out the next day.
What isn't great
- The map on a Chromecast is not smooth. It works, and there is a switch to lower the resolution if a TV struggles, but it is no games console.
- Photos come from each place's own website, so private apartments without a site often have one photo or none. I added a few by hand.
- The slopes and lifts come from OpenStreetMap. In the Alps that is very good. I have not checked small resorts elsewhere.
- Somebody still has to do the research first. This part only helps with deciding.
If you want to try it
Make a trip, add the places you're considering, open Review and press Show on TV. It works with a Chromecast or any TV with a browser, and it's free. Sharing a read-only link with grandparents is free too.
The research behind those 28 apartments is its own story: what an LLM got right and wrong when it planned this trip.