This is an integral part of your risk assessment. Actually visiting the destination and the accommodation you will be taking your group to is a vital part of your planning and preparation.

If you have never organised a group with us before, we offer week-long and weekend inspection visits to help you decide how suitable we are for your purposes. We usually ask for a nominal “frivolity” payment in advance of departure, and this is refunded when you subsequently book your group with us. This takes the form of a payment of £200.00 (for a full week stay in resort during the ski season, with travel by coach), or an agreed amount for a duration of less than this. The payment is refunded when you subsequently book a group (of at least 20 full price payers) with us, and is waived in the event that you pay group deposits before you travel. If you choose to fly to resort, we would ask you to cover costs incurred for the flight, parking and travel to the UK airport. We would cover costs from arrival at Turin airport.

If you were not available for a full week, you could come for a long weekend, and transport could be a combination of flight and coach. You could fly out, on a Thursday, for example, and then return on our coach on the Saturday. Alternatively, you could come out on a coach, and return on the following Monday or Tuesday. In either case, you would see enough of the action to be able to get a good grasp of how things happen, and of the geography. This could also happen at the beginning and end of term, particularly the December, January and April breaks.

Visits during the summer term can also be worthwhile. You may not see the resort in action, but as an exercise in seeing the lie of the land, assessing the organisational problems, and turning a verbal description and photographs into a reality, nothing is better than an actual visit, and this is certainly better than not going at all.

If you are thinking of arranging your own transport, then flights into Turin are the most convenient, giving you a transfer to resort of just over an hour. Flights to Turin are available with Ryanair from Stansted (www.ryanair.com), easyjet from Luton (www.easyjet.com), and British Airways from Gatwick (www.ba.com).

Unfortunately, past experience leads us to underline that inspection visits are only offered to genuine intending school group snowsport trip organisers. We will ask for confirmation that applicants do fit into this category.