Turkey's ski resorts, measured the same way

The figure on a resort's own website is usually correct — by that resort's definition. The problem is that definitions vary: some count magic carpets as lifts and some do not; some measure slope length round trip and some one way.

Putting those numbers side by side is like writing centimetres and inches in the same column. The table looks full, the ranking looks sensible, and the result is wrong.

So all four metrics in this directory come from one source. You will find higher or lower values elsewhere for individual resorts; we do not mix them in. Comparability is worth more than any single number being the most current.

Slope length is the best predictor of how many days a resort will occupy you. As a rough rule, under 20 km suits a weekend and over 40 km suits a week.

Vertical drop tells you how long the descents are, and it does not always track length. Ergan Dağı is the clearest case: a small 9.4 km network with 1,220 m of vertical — very long descents on a short network.

Lift count decides how long you queue, and in weekend crowds it matters more than slope length. Uludağ is third by length but far ahead with 25 lifts.

Elevation range is the strongest predictor of snow reliability — and the number to read is the base, not the summit. The cover goes there first.

No piste count. Counting pistes depends on definitions: is a slope that forks one run or two, and does a connector count? Resorts answer differently, so the counts are not comparable.

No prices. Fares change within a season, and showing an undatable price as current sends readers to the wrong budget.

No season dates. Opening and closing depend on snow, shift every year, and republishing last year's dates produces the wrong plan. For all three, check each resort's own announcements.

And no live piste status. There is no way to verify which runs are open across twenty resorts from one place, and an incomplete open/closed table can send someone hundreds of kilometres for nothing.

The risk of relying on one source is that the source is wrong. To test that, we compared two catalogue entries against independent official sources.

Erciyes's elevation range (2,088–3,346 m) matched the operator's own lift table exactly. Kartepe's slope length and elevation range held up the same way.

The same comparison also exposed a difference in method: the official Erciyes source says 19 installations while this catalogue says 14. The gap is five magic carpets — a definitional difference, not a contradiction, and precisely why we do not mix the two sources in one table.