Bareges & La Mongie, France

Gaizka Perea from SPAIN writes:

A comment to Robs observations:
If you worked in any of the Spanish islands or in many towns of the Spanish east coast, you would know that if 80% of your customers are English or German, you better learn some English AT LEAST!
In La Mongie there are far more Spaniards than French in the winter season, and we spend far more money in Bareges/La Mongie than the French; so I would expect a little effort from the locals, and resort staff to communicate and ease any problems that we may encounter; AT LEAST you could have ONE guy in the resort that spoke English and Spanish; this way, from any point of the resort the staff could phone him and solve the language problems.
Apart from this, I love the area and off-piste snowboarding is great and almost endless in Bareges. But the last two years, snow has been scarce and the shortcomings of the staff have been highlighted.
The pistes have not been cared for enough and it was easy to find mud, rocks....in the middle of the piste, whereas smaller resorts with apparently less resources keep the pistes in great shape till the season ends. And to finish with my criticism (cos I really love the resort, I have been coming for 4 years), the snow park area seemed to be kept by drunken monkeys!!! Bad jumps/rails and too little, terrible boarder-cross. The snow park area is enormous but is totally under utilised. You could fit at least three times more jumps, rails etc... and to top it up, the snow park staff only takes care of it once a week or less.....on a daily basis, the ramps are wrecked in a couple of hours and no one cares about it, when they should be caring and fixing the ramps all day; I think that´s what they get paid for, and what I would expect after paying for my season pass.
Three years ago the snow park was ok, I don´t know what happened....Luz Ardiden snow park is 10 times better in 4 times less space.

2008-03-26