I stayed at the Mountain Paradise with my boyfriend for a week over the new year period in December 08 and would recommend it to others if you get a cheap deal.

The room was clean and spacious with a mini kitchen in it which was useful, microwave, hob, toaster and kettle etc. Not luxurious but for what we paid it made a comfy and clean base for our trip.
There is a small supermarket opposite the hotel which is very handy for drinks and snacks etc.

However the staff are pretty misserable and not too friendly and we could not face sitting in the restaurant due to the amount of smoke from the smokers.

As you can still smoke everywhere in bankso, as non smokers we found this particulaly bad in the hotel. We had a free breakfast each day but did not go back after the first day. It was not very organised at all, people pusing for a drink or to get a table and everyone smoking was a really awful experience. It was classed as a buffet breakfast but I would give this a miss!

The location of the hotel is good, 3 hour drive from Sofa and it is inbetween the town and the ski zone, around 5 mins walk to the gondola and 10 mins walk to the town. The town is pretty with loads of local mexanas to choose from which are all very cosy and traditional and they all have massive menus and bbqs and grills serving tons of meat for good prices! You will not go hungry here! We ate for around £35 per night for 2 people including wine and tons of food! Staff can seem unfriendly at the restaurants but once you are in, they are very nice and hospitable, dont be put off. They all had live music when we were there too which was really nice.

I would totally recommend pre booking your lift pass and ski hire
before you go. I used a company called Bulgariaski (http://www.bulgariaski.com/) and they were great! The transfers were very reasonable and very reliable and a rep brought our lift passes to our hotel when we arrived so we didnt have to que.

There are massive queues for the gondals if you get there early. We arrived around 1-2pm every day and never had to que for more than a few minutes...perfect time to ski! I did hear many people who get there between 8.30 and 10am and queue for hours! The ski runs are good, the blue runs are nice but we did have a lot of snow fall when we were there.

I would recommend bansko for a 3-4 night stay. The only issue we found was the smoking but it wasn't so bad in the restaurants. The hotel is worth staying at if you get a good deal as the location is good.

We spent New Year in Bansko skiing and stayed at the Mountain Paradise hotel. With a few exceptions, we found the skiing to be pretty good (largely due to a huge fall of fresh snow while we were there), the food to be average, the customer service to be comically poor and the morning queues enough to stop us from going back.

Firstly the hotel was pretty good. We had an apartment which slept 6 and was excellent value for money. The bar in the lobby was good with genuinely friendly and prompt staff- the only ones we found in the whole town. The restaurant in the basement is best avoided however and the reception staff are not helpful. We were without power and water for a day and a night but so was the rest of the town so not the fault of the hotel. I'd recommend the Mountain Paradise, especially after reading reviews for some of the other hotels.

The skiing facilities are adequate with the one major exception being the queues for lift passes and to get up the main access gondola in the morning. On our first day we queued for 2 hours to get lift passes and then another 2.5hours to get up the gondola, so after getting to the slopes at 8.30 we started skiing about 1.30. The queues for the access gondola form each day by about 8.35 and grow fast. We found that if you get there by 8.30 you hardly queue at all (but since the rental shops don't open until then this is difficult to acheive if you don't take your gear home each night). By 8.35 you'll queue for about 20 - 30mins and by 8.45 it was more like an hour. If you're not there by 9am stay in bed and go up at lunchtime- you'll get the same amount of skiing in. The queue itself is not based on the orderly English style but is basically everyone trying to push in at once, coming in from the sides, sending their kids to push in for them, etc etc. It is extremely annoying after queueing for an hour to have people literally lift the cordon out of the way and elbow in in front of you. We saw several altercations, including two fights, in this queue and the mountain staff do nothing to make it run more smoothly. Basically its the Eastern European method of "get to the front by any means necessary", versus the English style of "get to the front in the order you arrived" and by itself this is enough to stop me going back to Bansko.

Once you are on the slopes the queues are minimal and the lifts are all pretty fast and reliable. The pistes themselves are limited (only one black run and most runs finish in one of two places) and crowded, with the beginners snow-plowing down the middle and the better skiiers and boarders skiing in between the pistes and down the sides of the groomed trails. We saw (and were all at various times involved in) collisions on the slopes due to the mix of beginners and advanced skiiers on each run, and the fact the runs all converge at the end.

The off-piste runs were really good. We had about a foot of snow fall while we were there and had a great couple of days making fresh tracks through the trees in knee-deep powder.

We found the food on the mountain to be OK, once we worked out where to go, and not expensive.

Rental gear was cheap (about EUR 130 for a week for brand new gear) but there is a serious lack of availability. We had to visit several places before we found one with gear to rent, and the day after we arrived there was none to rent anywhere in Bansko. People were faced with the choice of not skiing or purchasing gear.

The facilities in town are a mixture of good and apalling. The Old Town is very nice and has some good places to eat and drink, and the Mediterranean restaurant at the top of the town is superb. The food at Amigos on the other hand is possibly the most revolting I have ever had at a restaurant and the service at the Guiness Hotel bar is so bad and rude we thought we might be on candid camera.

Generally the infrastructure of the town is still in development, other than in the Old Town. As well as the power cut mentioned above, there are building sites everywhere and numerous service trenches and uncovered manholes that are not marked and virtually invisible at night. We hit a pothole while driving that destroyed one wheel of our car and watched as about 10 other cars suffered the same fate and we felt at more risk of breaking a leg walking around town than on the slopes. The area at the bottom of the ski lift is part road, part car park and part pedestrian area with cars, buses and skiiers all competing to get through. We heard of someone who broke their leg only to find that the Bansko hospital has no crutches. In short there is a general lack of planning and you get the feeling the place is a few years away from being completed.

However we did enjoy the trip. As mentioned, the skiing was very enjoyable and, with the exception of the morning gondola queues, as a group we found the shortcomings of Bansko to be funny rather than a major inconvenience. If they sort out the acces queues Bansko will be a good place for a cheap ski holiday if you are not bothered about fine dining, good infrastucture or being treated with basic courtesay. Its also probably a place to go in a group so you can make your own fun rather than rely on what's available locally.

Visited Bansco for snowboarding trip with five friends. Although the hotel appears very nce at first glance it has been poorly finished if you could say it had been finished at all. We had a penthouse apartment and although it was spacious and had reasonable facilities the stairs were precarious and much of detail (skirts, shower, roof) were unfinished and at times falling apart.

Our biggest complaint however was the way we were treated by the staff. Our list of poblems was endless but highlights included: a 'free' transfer to the gondola that had a fee introduced on our arrival. This was suspicious as the fee changed every day and the staff seemed happy to invent new ways to extract charges from us. In addition, once paid, there was no guarantee that the bus would arrive to transfer you to or from the gondola which meant several long walks to and from the lifts with no hope of an apology/refund.

Cleaning and fresh towels were meant to be included (as they are part of the apartment service charge) but we were charged for a room that was only 'tidied', as we were when friends we met while visiting came back to our apartment for drinks.

Perhaps this would have been more bearable had the hotel staff not been so overtly hostile throughout our visit, including complaints that we had arrived late in the nght. A matter beyond our control as we had driven through the night from Sofia. Add to this that Bansco as a resort is far from developed (e.g. irractic road network) and unfortunately this makes for a dissappointing trip I would not be quick to repeat.