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Crowd analysis

School holidays and busyness

See where school holidays pile up, which weeks are rammed, and when you can get good conditions without the crowds.

Key findings for the 2026/27 ski season

As of . Average across the ski destinations we track, using school holiday dates from 26 countries.

Busiest weeks

  1. Week of 28 December 2026: 100% crowd pressure, with schools off in 22 countries including Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada.
  2. Week of 21 December 2026: 100% crowd pressure, with schools off in 21 countries including Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada.
  3. Week of 15 February 2027: 99% crowd pressure, with schools off in 11 countries including Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland.

Quietest weeks from January to March

  1. Week of 1 March 2027: 66% crowd pressure, with schools off in 2 countries including France, Netherlands.
  2. Week of 8 March 2027: 71% crowd pressure, with schools off in 3 countries including Canada, Netherlands, United States.
  3. Week of 11 January 2027: 72% crowd pressure, with schools off in 3 countries including Australia, South Korea, New Zealand.
How we calculate busyness

We track school holiday dates from 50+ countries and weight each country by our estimate of how many visitors it sends to each destination. When a feeder country is on school holiday, its weight contributes to that week's crowd pressure score, and we add a smaller lift for peak-season base demand so genuinely busy non-holiday weeks are not shown as empty.

The score uses a logarithmic curve: the first few overlapping countries have the biggest impact, with diminishing returns as more pile on. A week climbs toward the top of the scale when feeder countries representing well over half of a destination's visitors are on holiday at once.

France, Germany and the Netherlands stagger their holidays by school zone. Where we have zone-level dates we count only the share of the country actually off each week, so a single staggered zone is not read as the whole nation being away.

This is a school-holiday proxy weighted by an estimated visitor mix. It is best for comparing weeks within a season, and it does not capture one-off events, pricing, weather-driven day trips, or local domestic crowds.

Select a country to see its feeder-country weighting. “All countries” shows the average across all destinations.

This crowd data feeds directly into our Best Time to Go analysis, where it is combined with conditions scores and pricing to find the optimal weeks.

Use this chart

Journalists, clubs and bloggers are welcome to embed or reproduce this chart. Please keep the credit link to this page. The image refreshes daily.

Ski resort crowd pressure by week, 2026/27 ski season, from PeakWave
Chart: School holidays and resort busyness, PeakWave. As of 11 October 2026.
Embed code
<figure style="margin:0;max-width:800px">
  <a href="https://peakwave.co/research/school-holidays"><img src="https://peakwave.co/research/school-holidays/chart.svg" alt="Ski resort crowd pressure by week, 2026/27 ski season, from PeakWave" width="800" height="420" style="width:100%;height:auto" loading="lazy"></a>
  <figcaption>Chart: <a href="https://peakwave.co/research/school-holidays">School holidays and resort busyness, PeakWave</a></figcaption>
</figure>

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