Bansko Snow Forecast

Tony from Cyprus writes:

Bansko is a good skiing resort. We had a very nice time during our visit in March 2014. Weather wasn’t great on second and third day but lifts we used continued working. Our hotel was half board so we didn’t eat in town except for the kebab sandwiches and pizza slices on the way back from skiing, around 2ish, every day.

The gondola (main lift or cable car that takes you from Bankso village itself to the skiing resort) is a half hour journey. One can either get to it as it opens at 8am and face some queuing or wait 'till 9.30 and have a lot less queues. But on Sunday and bank holidays it is packed with visitors and non-skiers, sight seers from Bulgaria and those coming from Greece so you may have to take a taxi, like we did, on Green Monday when we stood in a queue under the rain for 20 minutes and hardly moved six feet that day. Taxis, which are equipped with metres, are fairly reasonable; the ride cost from the bottom of the gondola to the top cost us 35 Levas.

For ski hire we used a shop called Tsakaris Ski located more or less apposite the gondola. Here we were given half the price to hire snowboards and boots + skis and boots compared to another place (60 leva instead of 117) and the guys were very helpful and polite and spoke English and Greek too.

We went out to town every night but apart from the strip clubs we only found two pubs / bars. Amigo, which also serves food and has a very nice band every night playing good music and serving Shisha, was the best out of the two we tried, the other was the Blue Lion.

Tourist shops are reasonably priced for souvenirs etc and local outlets sell food and snack + drinks etc in the high street.

Some people get offended or annoyed with the guys standing on establishment doors trying to get clients in, but this is the norm in Bulgaria and throughout most of the Mediterranean islands and resorts that I have been to and if you say no thank you I already ate, or no thank you maybe tomorrow, no one is going to take a bite out of you!

The slopes are quite good and wide at top ends, they get narrower and busier obviously the lower down you go. Plenty of blue slopes, which was great for me as a novice snowboarder and the rest of my friends and family went on to the reds and blacks. Half way down the slopes and at bottom there are restaurants and bars, with music and indoor heating, Though their prices were quite expensive (bottle of beer was 7 leva compared to 4 for a pint in Bansko).

Bankso has plenty of parking places but I wouldn’t recommend driving as most signs were in Bulgarian and not English/Latin characters. High street pavement is not so good and definitely not good for people with disabilities.