With a passion for snow, winter sports and three sons of his own, Patrick is keen to support all efforts that encourage families to take their children skiing or snowboarding.
Coming from a working background, Patrick is particularly aware of the costs of winter sports for families and has sought to promote initiatives to drive costs down for families, by highlighting these in his writing and reporting, including compiling features on how families can get to the snow for less.
One of Patrick’s major projects in this area has been a study of child lift ticket pricing (including the different agers to which children are offered free or discount passes, and the percentage of discount – which varies wildly from resort to resort and country to country – on behalf of The International Ski Federation (FIS)as part of their ‘Bring Children To The Snow’ Campaign which has the same goals.
http://www.fis-ski.com/inside-fis/development/bring-children-to-the-snow/
The FIS published Patrick’s first report, examining pricing from more than 700 ski areas in 50 countries, in 2013 – 14 and plan to publish updated versions.
http://snowkidz.com/en/Service/Reports/Childrens_Lift_Ticket_Prices