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Comment by taminka | Hacker News Reader

it's cheaper to just buy your own pair at that point, not to mention that those skis are usually beat up, and mostly beginner/intermediate level...

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In Switzerland it varies. Many places will also offer expert hire where you get brand-new skis and at the end of the season you can choose to buy them for cost.

FYI, the rental skis, even if they look the same as the same skis you could buy retail are not the same. They have bigger edges and a dicker base. The bindings are not the same.

This is because they are built to go through the machine after each rental. Good retails skis have less "robust" but faster, thinner base, they would be dead after 3 months of rental.

Source: I spend way too many hours each season in a ski shop taking care of a mix of rental and competitive hardware.

I always suspected my rental skis had dicker bases! (Sorry for typo-sniping for cheap laughs.)

French living in Germany, sometimes I am mixing up things. What is interesting is that the Swiss person (probably German speaking) did not notice. Thank you for allowing to laugh after the fact :-D

This is a double bonus thread for me. I did not know (or remember from high school German 30 years ago...) that dicker meant thicker. :D

I’ve rented skis in the US for a weekend out skiing, and of course they are usually pretty beat up (to be expected), and I don’t expect any amazing performance (wasted on me anyway). But, they are taking about something that seems a bit different, renting skis for a whole season. Almost seems more like leasing a car vs renting one?

>This is because they are built to go through the machine after each rental

What machine are you referring to here? It sounds like you are referring to some kind of waxing / edge sharpening / cleaning device, which would be extreme luxury compared to the rental shop at my local hill where they intake the rentals for the day and dump them back into a bucket for the next skier.

Renting for a whole season seems pretty different from renting for a weekend or whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the more expensive option than buying—but you get brand new skis every year.

Maybe for us in the US, this is more equivalent to buying every year and then reselling? Haha.

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