 Poster: A snowHead
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As the title suggests. I built it to replace a spreadsheet I inevitably created every year when looking for my next snow holiday.
https://going-snowhere.com
It does what I want it too, interested to hear feedback to make it more useful for others too.
Ps, it sucks on mobile, I know, but it's a lot of data and figured most people would be holiday searching on a laptop/pc... I might be wrong though?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Crystal will be happy
Loads of work. Hats off.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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I hope so, I'm tracking click throughs with the hope of getting onto their affiliate program, just so it pays for it's own hosting. Not that I'll take it down if it doesn't, I know I'll use it at least and it's only £10 a month.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Impressive. The other thing I would be looking for when making a comparison is size of area (km of piste).
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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@tgriley, does it only link to Crystal?
I found the layout a bit confusing at first ... i.e. and I appreciate the work applied so this isn't a criticism ... but it does feel rather like an excel spreadsheet 
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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Bad Gastein....3hr 20mins transfer time? Are people walking up the mountain dragging their gear up there now?
When I went there in January it's about 1hr 30mins by car from Innsbruck.
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@king key, other way round, three hours from Innsbruck and 1.5 from Salzburg
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Oops!, I flew into both Innsbruck and Saltzburg on different trips this year. 
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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| j b wrote: |
| Impressive. The other thing I would be looking for when making a comparison is size of area (km of piste). |
It already includes piste area, it's not displayed by default, you need to selected it in the columns?
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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| king key wrote: |
Bad Gastein....3hr 20mins transfer time? Are people walking up the mountain dragging their gear up there now?
When I went there in January it's about 1hr 30mins by car from Innsbruck. |
I'm just scraping the data and trying extract durations, unless I've been there myself I won't know if it's a bit rubbish, I'll look into that example.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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@tgriley, no need , he was mistaken
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Great work @tgriley. Maybe allow people to select their arrival airport and filter transfer times from there as a lot of people will have limited flight options.
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You know it makes sense.
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@tgriley, OK got it after a bit of trial and error. When I ticked the box a column appeared outside my screen view, I had to scroll or zoom out to see. Even unticking one of the other boxes didn't bring it in frame.
It looks like work in progress at the moment, but I am sure you will fill in the missing cells.
And realising what has gone into this, it would be churlish to point out you have missed out quite a few sizeable resorts (bigger than many included) but I assume that is again work in progress.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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| j b wrote: |
@tgriley, OK got it after a bit of trial and error. When I ticked the box a column appeared outside my screen view, I had to scroll or zoom out to see. Even unticking one of the other boxes didn't bring it in frame.
It looks like work in progress at the moment, but I am sure you will fill in the missing cells.
And realising what has gone into this, it would be churlish to point out you have missed out quite a few sizeable resorts (bigger than many included) but I assume that is again work in progress. |
Aaah ok, so some visual queue to let the user know a column is off screen. Good point, at the moment all you'd see is the horizontal scroll bar change size.
It is indeed a work in progress, however it's based off of data scraped off of crystal skis website so if the resort isn't on there it won't be on my site for now. I'm not going to be adding other travel agents or manually adding any for the foreseeable.
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Poster: A snowHead
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Out of curiosity where are the flight and transfer times calcuated from?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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@tgriley, I see, if you base it on Crystal destinations that explains the omissions. (And presumably explains some surprising inclusions of small resorts too).
I can see the point of using a consistent souce for pricing comparisons, but most of the other columns are data available on multiple websites. But as a personal project, there is only so much you can do - though folk on this forum tend to spread their net wider than a single tour operator.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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A couple of comments:
1. The UI around the "Columns" bar needs some tweaking - when you're in the middle of the bar it's not intuative if the label is to the left, or right of the checked box. Maybe swap the ratings and snowfall option from checkboxes to multi-select dropdowns so there's a little more space between options, or split onto 2 rows, again so there's more space between items.
2. I'm also unsure what the table's telling me. I just filtered for "Austria" and apparently Alpbash is only a 1h 15m transfer...from somewhere. No idea where it's a 1h 15m transfer from though!
3. As @8611 suggested being able to select airports would be a really useful addition. I've just booked a school holiday time trip for next year and found flights to Munich that were still a reasonable price so knew I wanted to fly to Munich and wanted a ski resort upto 2h from there. I'm guessing you have the data to tell me that, just need a way for users to access it.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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@Mjit, where are you flying from? Finding a 2 hour transfer from innsbruck is a bit pointless if it expects you to drive 4 hours to Gatwick.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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Seems to include a lot of smaller resorts in some countries, but there are still loads of larger ones missing. It's almost like you've started from the list of where a particular company runs package holidays to.
A few missing Swiss ones just off the top of my head: Flims, Laax, Murren, Adelboden, Engelberg, Morgins, Champery, Nendaz, Verbier, Saas Fee... so many more I CBA to look for them all.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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I personally think this is excellent and something the TO websites should have done a long time ago.
Snowfall figures were a clever inclusion. Perhaps include snow forecast too? Although possibly technically difficult.
Nevertheless, it's the best tool I've come across of it's type. Thank you and well done.
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If you have a slow connection the auto-updating is a bit of a pain. For me each change is currently taking about 4 seconds, so multiple column and filter changes takes forever...  I would rather be able to select all the columns & filters I need quickly, and then a single Update/ Refresh button.
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| Chaletbeauroc wrote: |
Seems to include a lot of smaller resorts in some countries, but there are still loads of larger ones missing. It's almost like you've started from the list of where a particular company runs package holidays to.
A few missing Swiss ones just off the top of my head: Flims, Laax, Murren, Adelboden, Engelberg, Morgins, Champery, Nendaz, Verbier, Saas Fee... so many more I CBA to look for them all. |
It's exactly what he's done. He said so. It's a scrape from Crystal
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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@holidayloverxx, Yeah, I should have read the whole thread. Although the term 'scrape' was not immediately obvious in its meaning.
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| johnE wrote: |
| @Mjit, where are you flying from? Finding a 2 hour transfer from innsbruck is a bit pointless if it expects you to drive 4 hours to Gatwick. |
While for this trip - 3.9 miles from the Heathrow T4 Premier Inn to Heathrow T5, but just because it's an early flight and I'd rather take cheap public transport to the airport Friday evening/pay to stay overnight than get up in the middle of the night and pay as much for a taxi there Saturday morning.
Anyway I'm not following your logic. I, like I think most people have a good-enough grasp of UK georgraphy to know which airports are near them and pick their destination based on where they can fly to from there. My grasp on Austrian geography is more limited though so while I known Manchester airport is further away from me than Birmingham airport I don't know off the top of my head if flying to Saltsburg would have me driving 30min to Alpbach or driving the full width of Austria.
(Turns out it's central, so best served by Innsbruch or Munich)
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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For most of the columns, it would work well to "scrape" data from one of the consolidator sites, something like On the Snow or J2Ski. Or even SCGB if that part of its website is still open access. That would generate a much more comprehensive list including the missing Swiss resorts (it was the absence of Davos/Klosters which surprised me).
However if it is to include a price comparison, that makes more sense from a single provider.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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Great idea. The package companies won’t love you! Just to note: you have transfer time to Morzine listed as 1h4m and Les Gets and Avoriaz as 2h4m. I’m sure it’s a glitch but as you know these resorts are adjacent to each other and from Geneva Les Gets is the shortest at yes approx 1h4m…
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| Mjit wrote: |
A couple of comments:
1. The UI around the "Columns" bar needs some tweaking - when you're in the middle of the bar it's not intuative if the label is to the left, or right of the checked box. Maybe swap the ratings and snowfall option from checkboxes to multi-select dropdowns so there's a little more space between options, or split onto 2 rows, again so there's more space between items.
2. I'm also unsure what the table's telling me. I just filtered for "Austria" and apparently Alpbash is only a 1h 15m transfer...from somewhere. No idea where it's a 1h 15m transfer from though!
3. As @8611 suggested being able to select airports would be a really useful addition. I've just booked a school holiday time trip for next year and found flights to Munich that were still a reasonable price so knew I wanted to fly to Munich and wanted a ski resort upto 2h from there. I'm guessing you have the data to tell me that, just need a way for users to access it. |
Thanks for the feedback!
1. Agreed, ill sort that
2. Most common feedback by far! I'll what I can do...
3. 2nd most common feedback  , I need to make it clear somehow that this isnt a holiday search, just a simple table for filtering resorts
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You know it makes sense.
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| johnE wrote: |
| Out of curiosity where are the flight and transfer times calcuated from? |
Its really noddy, I take the shortest of all the duration from the resorts landing page
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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| Chaletbeauroc wrote: |
Seems to include a lot of smaller resorts in some countries, but there are still loads of larger ones missing. It's almost like you've started from the list of where a particular company runs package holidays to.
A few missing Swiss ones just off the top of my head: Flims, Laax, Murren, Adelboden, Engelberg, Morgins, Champery, Nendaz, Verbier, Saas Fee... so many more I CBA to look for them all. |
Currently contained to just what crystal offer unfortunately
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Poster: A snowHead
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What are you scraping with? I'm using Playwright on node.js against an admittedly grungy source (with multiple nested iframes, no less), but it's not being terribly reliable. Perhaps there are better approaches...
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| j b wrote: |
For most of the columns, it would work well to "scrape" data from one of the consolidator sites, something like On the Snow or J2Ski. Or even SCGB if that part of its website is still open access. That would generate a much more comprehensive list including the missing Swiss resorts (it was the absence of Davos/Klosters which surprised me).
However if it is to include a price comparison, that makes more sense from a single provider. |
To be honest I'd value the wider net over the price, the price is so flawed it doesn't really work as a point of comparison. Ill take a look
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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| 5RED wrote: |
| Great idea. The package companies won’t love you! Just to note: you have transfer time to Morzine listed as 1h4m and Les Gets and Avoriaz as 2h4m. I’m sure it’s a glitch but as you know these resorts are adjacent to each other and from Geneva Les Gets is the shortest at yes approx 1h4m… |
Thanks, ill take a look at the source data and see wtf has happened with that one
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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| phil_w wrote: |
| What are you scraping with? I'm using Playwright on node.js against an admittedly grungy source (with multiple nested iframes, no less), but it's not being terribly reliable. Perhaps there are better approaches... |
I'm using selenium, yeee wouldn't be fun if iframes where in the mix!
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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@tgriley, yes the quoted price will be very dependent on the exact point of data extraction - and will become rapidly outdated while the other data remains useful. Being more comprehensive of resorts would be a bigger benefit.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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@tgriley, very impressive , I do one just on Saalbach transport options and that's enough of a challenge
An edit for you, on the Crystal page it says transfer time 1.45 from Salzburg to Saalbach
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@tgriley, my point Is that flight times are meaningless unless you know where you are flying from. The site doesn't mention the source or destination airports. I assume the source is in the UK but even that is not stated.
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@johnE, follow the view holidays link and it's under travel advice
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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The 1990s called.
They want their Web design back.
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| Whitegold wrote: |
The 1990s called.
They want their Web design back. |
sorry, would you prefer 50% of the view port to be taken up by ads? Thats the 2020 way.
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FAQ
, it is very data heavy! Anything in particular that confused? It definitely needs work I'm just so close to it I can't see where.
