 Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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zarazag, if you are only going for a short ski trip there is lots of choice about insurance, but if you ski off piste you need to be careful to read small print. Many don't cover it, or only with a guide.
If you DIY a trip you will have to suck up delays and cancellations to a great extent - again, read the small print on cancellation and delay. If flights are cancelled, according to a recent discussion, insurance doesn't cover it - that's up to what you get from your airline, and that varies.
The tricky area for a DIY trip can be transfers. They typically cost more than cheap flights. Hiring a car can be the cheapest way, but then you need to be prepared to cope with snow chains if necessary, breakdowns, etc. There is plenty of information and advice available here on snowheads.
Generally, DIY trips will go smoothly but when they go wrong, you are on your own to a large extent. for example, if you are injured and can't make your return flight, or perhaps cannot drive your hire car, you would need to be in touch with the insurance company, who would meet some of the costs (provided you do as you are told) but you might need to find some extra accommodation - e.g. if your partner were taken into hospital the day before you are due to go home. You might have to work out how to get to a hospital, in a town some distance away, to visit them. You might have to hire a car to do that, or work out how to use public transport.
If you hit heavy snow on your drive to the resort and can't get there, you might need to find accommodation en route (happened to people I met here - they had to stop in a blizzard at 11 pm, after a very difficult journey with two small kids, and luckily found a few local people still drinking in a small hotel bar, who were very helpful and found them a room for the night). Insurance, even in the unlikely event that they were willing to shell out any extra dosh for such a contingency, wouldn't be any help to you when you find yourself stuck in a blizzard.
If you've been skiing before you will probably find that arranging ski hire, passes, etc will be no problem - resorts and shops are very eager to sell them to you and make it easy!
Some SHs on a DIY trip spent two (or was it three?) nights sleeping at Geneva airport a couple of years ago, in a spell of very bad weather.
In some smaller resorts you might struggle without some of the local language, but in big, well-known resorts, there's a lot of English spoken.
One main reason for going DIY is to have far more choice of accommodation. I don't see much point trying to do a DIY holiday to the same resort, and the same accommodation, as you could do with a Tour Operator.
It depends on your personality, really. Some people get a lot of satisfaction from sorting things out for themselves, and using their own initiative. Some don't. 
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