We are continually seeking feedback on what we currently do, suggestions on how we can improve and new ideas that may be out there. To make this easier, for those who access the website we have added a 'Comments' page which can be used to put your views to the Club Officers. Please let us know what you think. Many thanks.

PLEASE NOTE: We are still some way short of being able to communicate with all members having e-mail as we don't have all your mail addresses. If you are not currently receiving e-mail advices of Club issues, please use the 'Contact us' link to drop us a note and we'll pick up your mail address from there. This can also apply to any changes of details of which you may wish to notify us e.g. address, work details, contact numbers etc.

Our club officials

Left: John Symons - Founder & Secretary

Centre: Iain Smith - Treasurer

Right: Richard Minson - President

Thank you for visiting our web site which we hope you will find interesting. We hope that after reading about us you will want to join us. If you have any questions please contact us using the contact page and we will do our best to answer any questions you may have.

First something about the club officials.

John Symons - Founder and Secretary

John joined Lloyds Bank in 1965 straight from school starting work at Gidea Park, Romford, Essex. He took early retirement in August 2000 from his job as Branch Director of the West Essex Group, which coincidentally included Gidea Park, the branch he first worked at. His career included long spells in Business Banking.

It was in the autumn of 1987 that he first had the idea of a ski club in the Bank after meeting the secretaries of various ski clubs whilst on holiday in Austria. It took nearly a year to get all the permissions needed but then the club got under way and grew steadily. He learnt to ski in Austria in the Red-White-Red Ski School at Alpendorf. Returning regularly he made friends with the ski school owners and tour operator, Siegi Baumgartner. As a result we now work closely with the Ski School in Alpendorf and with Siegi Tours, the tour operator in St Veit, Salzburg, Austria that we run several of our ski trips through.

John fell in love with skiing from day one on skis and is keen to encourage new people to skiing. For the last two years he has worked as an instructor in Red-White-Red ski school for several weeks each season where he particularly enjoys teaching beginners.

Although retired he wonders how he ever found time to work and run the club as there are still not enough hours in the day.

Iain Smith - Treasurer

Iain joined Lloyds Bank in August 1987 in his home village of Whickham in the North East and has worked in Retail and Business Banking, Corporate and Audit around the country including spells in Edinburgh and Liverpool. He is currently a Risk Manager in Corporate based in Bristol.

Iain started skiing at school in Newcastle making four trips in his teens to Italy and France. He joined the Ski Club virtually on day one, attending the first Club trip in Austria as a 20 year old. He took on the role of Treasurer in 1989. He remains the only member of the Club to have missed a flight for a Club trip (still maintaining that it wasn't his fault but that of Mother Nature and a dodgy British Airways 747!).

Richard Minson - President (El Presidente)

Richard joined Lloyds Bank in April 1989 working as a computer programmer for Private Banking IT in Birmingham. Since then he has relocated to Haywards Heath and now works for GroupIT as part of SDCnet Brighton.

After meeting John & Iain at a work colleagues summer Barbeque in August 1994 Richard was talked into going skiing for the first time January 1995. After attending his first ski trip Richard acquired a serious skiing addiction, which eventually resulted in him being the first club member (excluding John) to attend all of the clubs ski trips in a given season. This feat eventually got him elevated to club President.

Aside from being the Club President his most notorious club achievement has been the destruction of a Snow Mobile after failing to negotiate a corner and driving it full tilt into a tree!!

Outside skiing Richard spends time playing & collecting board games (of which he has over 450) and polishing his car (a TVR Griffith 500).

A bit of history about the club itself

John started the club in 1987 as Lloyds Bank Ski Club, with the idea of getting people who were interested in skiing to get together to enjoy group ski trips. When the Bank acquired Cheltenham & Gloucester we changed our name to Black Horse Ski Club and were the first club to offer membership to all parts of the then Lloyds Bank Group. Although we started as a ski club we are now a ski and snowboard club.

The club was originally set up with the idea of getting groups of skiers together to go on a ski holiday. Groups could sometimes get discounts from tour operators and these would be passed back to the members on the trip in the form of lower prices. We quickly found tour operators had many ways of not giving group discounts but we also started to make contacts and organise our own trips. Now of our 5 trips each season, 4 are usually our own. Offering good value ski trips remains our prime role.

Our second aim was to ensure that our trips were suitable for all grades of skier from complete beginner to advanced. Too often as skiers ourselves we had seen people in resorts where the skiing was unsuitable for them and as a result they were put off. We were also keen to ensure that ski schools were good as the accepted fact was that over 75% of people who said they did not like their first ski holiday and would not go again, were put off by poor instruction. All our trips are suitable for all grades of skier including beginners. John is on most of the trips and is available to help with instruction where needed. For beginners we still recommend our Austrian trips which include ski school in the price.

Our third aim was to introduce people to skiing and boarding as a sport and encourage beginners. We wanted to be a club that was open to all grades of skier as well as all grades of staff. Today our membership includes many people who started their skiing and boarding with us and we have members from all parts of the group and from people who have just joined the group to senior management. We have pages on the Bank Intranet site although we do have some problems getting the Sports Club to keep them up to date for us. Periodically we get articles in Upfront and we now have this web site.

Our next aim was to become a free source of information on all aspects of snow skiing and boarding for our members. We quickly started asking our members to complete a questionnaire whenever they skied somewhere so we could build up a database of information on resorts, hotels, ski schools, après ski and tour operators. We have built up a large collection of information from that source and from published sources. We also have a contact that publishes a ski magazine, which is devoted to describing ski areas, the facilities there and how to get there. Part of our idea was to publish our own "In-house" magazine with articles on resorts, ski equipment, ski technique, fitness etc. At first we produced it every month from October to April. It soon proved too much for our secretary, who wrote most of it, set it up on computer, printed, sorted and posted it out. Holding down a full time job as a manager meant it could not be sustained. So we went to three editions a season, usually October, December and April/May. We keep it topical and light hearted. As far as we know we are the only club to produce a magazine of the size and quality we do. So we can now provide a lot of info in general from what clothes a beginner needs to the latest techniques.

Skiing and Snowboarding with the Black Horse

Primarily we are a club for Lloyds TSB Group employees, their spouses and families. However, we do have associate members, usually friends of members who have been on one of our holidays and asked if they can join so they can come again. We also allow people to remain members when they leave the group. Of course retired employees can be members, indeed John our secretary, is now retired from the group. We are non profit making, surviving on members subscriptions. Likewise our trips are non profit-making.

Over the years we have made lots of contacts in the ski world, which have enabled us to put together our own trips. In particular we have a very special friendship with an Austrian Tour Operator who provides a ski week in the Salzburg area. We also have friends with a hotel in Zermatt where we organise a pre-season trip. Since our second year we have organised a trip to either USA or Canada.

Organising trips is our major activity. On average we organise 5 trips each season including a long weekend at Easter, plus we organise a golf trip to Austria each September. Yes really golf. It's for historic reasons but we keep doing it and golfers love it. But back to skiing and boarding. We get bookings ranging from a single person to whole families and groups. Our youngest traveller was 8 months old. We try to ensure that our trips suit everyone but if for any reason we think it would not be right for you we will tell you so and why.

We are able to accommodate children as you can see, and on our Austrian trips we have baby-sitting, ski kindergarten and children's ski or boarding school. If you are travelling alone and have done so with holiday companies, you will know all about single supplements. On our Austrian trips they are very reasonable, usually adding £25 - £30 for the week.

On our other trips we ask you to share a twin room thus avoiding supplements. Of course you can ask for and have a single room. In that case we keep the cost to the lowest we can. In the event that you are prepared to share but we do not have someone to share with you then the club bears the cost of the single supplement, otherwise the single supplement is much less than tour operators charge. In Austria our trip has no "hidden extras" for evening entertainment. There are no reps asking you to pay for evening activities. With us they are all included and include things like Karaoke evening with limbo dancing contests, cow milking competition, live Austrian evening with "thigh" slapping and yodelling, ice curling and tobogganing. It also includes ski school. The ski school owners are friends of ours as is the senior instructor. We rate the school as one of the best we have ever seen.

In Zermatt we deal direct with the hotel. The owners and manager can't do enough for us. It's literally 100 yards from the station. Zermatt is a different world but one which we are able to offer at prices, which for Zermatt, are very good.

We always have a two-week trip to North America. We have been to Banff, Lake Louise, Breckenridge, Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Mountain, and on the East Coast, Sunday River and Killington. We sometimes also do two centre US trips to get more packed in. We like North America and so do our members. It is always the first trip to get fully booked.

So you want to talk work!!

Well if you must you must but, by popular demand, it gets to be off limits pretty quickly. If you are worried that you are going to be involved in talking shop all the holiday, forget it. It's an obvious icebreaker when you first meet people in the group but sales targets, your boss and the Bank in general are things to leave at home. It used to be a club rule that if you talked shop after day one it would cost you a round of drinks. These days we don't seem to need that rule. So unless you are a work "junkie" you can look forward to skiing in "work free zone"

I'm not sure about a group holiday

We freely admit that they don't suit everybody, but ever since we started we have had great groups of people who have really enjoyed themselves. What's more we get people come back year after year and some who book every trip we do in a season, so there must be something good about them. We get a mix of all abilities and ages, which seems to work well. We get people who are skiing for the first time. Then we get people who have skied before but have had their own group they went away with. For some reason that is no longer possible and they join us. We are NOT a singles club, but we do get a lot of single people who seem to make friends on our trips. We have had several "club" weddings and there are now young families out there as a result. We even have international members with members in the USA who were in the Bank before retiring.

We found the thing we wanted to avoid was the feeling that as you were in a group you had to take part in the group activities. It's quite simple really. On our trips there is always at least one of the club officials as well. We find out what is available, what it costs and when it happens and we let you know. After that it's entirely up to you. If you want to join in you can, if you don't nobody minds at all. For example, on our USA trips we always have minibuses for the time we are there. Quite often we will get part of the group wanting a break for a day and we will arrange a sightseeing or shopping trip, whilst the other minibus(es) will go off to a ski area. Overall our experience over the years is that there is something for everyone on our trips, that everyone fits in and makes friends and enjoys him or herself. You will be in a group of like-minded people with a common interest you can talk about.

Which trip would suit me best?

OK Lets give you a few scenarios and suggestions.

You have never skied or snowboarded before. Well first we would suggest you take some lessons on a dry slope or better still on the indoor slopes at Milton Keynes, Castleford or Tamworth. Then our Austrian week is for you. Ski/boarding school included and the school guarantees to teach you to ski or refunds your fees!

You have skied or boarded but not for a while now. Well our pre season Glacier trip to somewhere like Zermatt is perfect. Glaciers are wide and smooth, just the place to get the legs working again.

Reached a plateau but don't seem to progress any further? Austria it is because of the ski school. The senior instructor is a friend of ours and personally makes sure everything is OK.

Got children. Austria or North America.

Want to "rip" up the piste or get off piste? Well it has to be North America, relaxed, wide-open slopes, lots of off piste and skiing and boarders Fun Parks, as only they know how.

Whatever your situation we will gladly advise you on what we think is right for you.

Who can go on a trip?

That's simple - anyone can go on one of our trips just as long as they or one of the people in their party are a member.

What else?

Well we arrange trips to the indoor snow slopes at Milton Keynes and Castleford indoor slopes through the summer. We can arrange insurance for you, car parking at airports, airport hotels and car hire if you want it on one of our trips. But please don't ask if we get 50% off because it just doesn't happen like that in the travel business.

Money matters

OK So what does it cost? Well membership costs £12 per annum payable by standing order. We get no financial help from the Bank so we have to cover all our costs including postage, stationary etc from subscriptions. For that reason you will understand that we can only send out magazines and trip details to our members. We do get people who ask just to get the magazine and brochure without joining!

If you fancy a gamble we have our 100 Club. Cost is £2 per month. We have cash prizes each month but best of all we keep a little back each month to allow us to give 1 or 2 free places on one of our European trips.

And now?

If you would like to join please go to the How to join page and then follow the instructions there for completing your application on line. Iain, Richard and I hope you will join the club and look forward to meeting you on one of our trips.