Montana Snowcenter — Local services in Bergeijk

DANGER! AVOID IF GROUP BEGINNER LESSON Ski lessons for beginners basically meant on my young daughters lesson, follow the child in front of you, teach yourself how to snow plough, if you fall, learn how to get up on your own, and worst of all, be left crying for 5 minutes halfway up the slope and slowly realise, that as helpless as you are, you still have to teach yourself how to ski to get down. Hopefully my daughters lesson was a one-off, and judging by all the other great comments / reviews, this must have been massive bad luck for her to have such incompetent ski helpers (THERE IS NO WAY THEY COULD BE DESCRIBED AS SKI INSTRUCTORS). They ignored or seemed oblivious to their role to guard the health and safety of their fledging young skiers. I could go on about another crammed ski lesson setting up in the middle of my child’s lesson literally blocking their ski path! You literally had to witness it to believe it. I was expecting mr bean to come out as the next ski helper, utterly useless and my daughter is so filled with fear after basically being abandoned by ski Montana staff when she was at her most vulnerable - her first time skiing. My daughter is now adamant she won’t go again and I can’t blame her. 4:15pm group ski lesson - Saturday October 28th. I’m not a vengeful person but clearly someone needs to get sacked for this massive incompetence. We have videos to prove the complete lack of professionalism of the staff but am unable to upload videos so have taken some screen shots of the video which clearly shows her instructor ignoring the fact that my daughter is travelling down backwards and having a chat with another instructor!! (The staff are in yellow ski suits on the left in the photos, busy neglecting...

EDIT: I was not trying to downvalue this venue at all. I merely described my personal experience based on a one-time visit. Perhaps other people’s visits had much better value in their cases. I do think this place has great potencial to be/become an added value to the area, they just needs to take a step back to look and see possible improvements.

Original post: For a small and limited skicenter like Montana Snowcenter, the prices are too high. One hour of free skiing access is about €23 (too high) and a daypass is €33 (fair). These prices include basic equipment, but still these prices are way to high for what you get.

The one time I visited Montana, there was a lot going wrong that day due to mismanagement. The lift didn't work properly that day. Out of 60 minutes every hour, the belt was standing still and was defect for about 50 minutes. The snow was of terrible quality.. or actually you can not call it snow. It was pure ice on the slopes. And mind you this was in the morning.. not even at the end of the day.

The absolute worst thing that day was the personnel and staff working in the restaurant/bar. Their rude and nonchalant attitude towards the customers.. the terribly slow service.. the poor food that was given after all that. It was just a big no-go for me.

I believe this place has potencial, but under different management with eye for quality and customer satisfaction. They have the basic infrastructure to get a 4 or 5 star review, but a lot has to be improved to deserve that kind of rating. I can advise the current management to really work together with some experts in this field and get closer to...

Buyer beware: Our 5yr old daughter went here for an introductory ski lesson. That was with a group of 5 kids and two teachers: one taking them off the lift and sending them down, one at the bottom catching them and making sure they got on the lift again. Our daughter enjoyed it a lot and got quite some rides in. Because she liked it so much and seemed to make a lot of progress we booked the first course. Montana went bait and switch on us : at the first lesson there was only one teacher on a group of three kids. So now instead of spending her time skiing she spent it waiting in front of the lift or waiting on the slope, while the teacher was busy running up and down to console crying kids, untangle skis, pull kids off the lift, push them over bumps, etc, etc. Our daughter still enjoyed herself and improved her skiing, but it could've been so much better if Montana would actually sell the same thing they demonstrated. Instead their model seems to use this experience to upsell people to private lessons. Two other teachers were busy one on one with other kids... Putting five kids together with two teachers instead would've provided a much better learning experience for all, at reduced costs. All in all it's an ok place for an introductory course, with teachers and materials and everything, but it could be so much better by organizing it more...