Village with a difference: Australian ski resort that's not like the rest

The Age

19 hours ago

Between them, the alpine villages of Hotham and Dinner Plain have about 7000 beds; Dinner Plain accounts for 1900 of them.
Going back almost a decade, alongside the ski clubs, another club – similar in concept but broader in purpose – arrived in the Dinner Plain village. Club Wyndham South Pacific resumed a trend of timeshare accommodation, popular in the 1980s, but faded somewhat since. And it includes Dinner Plain as one of its 63 club destinations.
In 2016, Wyndham bought a Dinner Plain commercial outlet that featured accommodation, a bar and a restaurant, then known as Rundles, now called Elements. Along with that complex, Wyndham bought numerous chalets and apartments throughout the village to make them available to their many members.
One key advantage of their presence is that it is there year-round. Alpine villages can become ghost towns outside winter and holiday periods, but Wyndham operates the restaurant and bar all year, adding to the life and energy of the village. So outside winter, the fishers, walkers, cyclists and mountain bikers all have somewhere to go.
But winter remains the main attraction, with Hotham's snowfields the magnet. As you get closer on the drive from Dinner Plain, the ridges and gullies of Hotham emerge, folding together like interlocking fingers, open slopes or treed trails among them, sprinkled with skiers and snowboarders making their way up and down again.
'At Hotham, we don't really have an uphill problem, we have a downhill problem,' says the lift company general manager, Tina Burford. By this, she means they have the capacity they need to get skiers to the top of the runs, but they have some problems with congestion as they go down.
This is especially true off the Heavenly Valley chairlift. At the top, there are vast terrain choices, but towards the bottom, skiers and boarders stream into an area called Slalom Gully like creeks into a fast-flowing river.
Their strategy to deal with this is to make more terrain available by improving summer slope grooming and winter snowmaking – the former to make more terrain skiable with less snow cover; the latter to help provide that snow cover.
And that will simply build on the appeal for Dinner Plain.
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Club Wyndham South Pacific membership packages from $22,899. Members then receive vacation credits annually. A two-bedroom apartment or chalet at Dinner Plain might cost a member 22,300 vacation credits for a week's stay. In 2025, the annual levy on those credits is $2176. Off the shelf from a commercial provider, a seven-night stay in a two-bedroom apartment for a family of four in the Victorian snow season could cost $3300 to $10,000. Club members have scope to use their membership at 63 club destinations worldwide. Properties are available to non-members (as part of a program encouraging them to join).
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