Whistler heli tours with a landing: the two compared

The two landing Whistler heli tours cost $314 and $369. The four that stay airborne run from $159 to $251. So the step up is somewhere between $63 and $210, depending on which flight you would otherwise have booked.

It buys two things. The first is obvious: you get out. Every photograph you have seen of a helicopter parked on snow with a ridge behind it was taken during a landing, and it is a different experience from looking down through a window at the same ground. The second is less obvious: a landing forces the flight to be longer, because the aircraft has to descend, settle, wait and climb again. That is why these two are the two longest listings here.

What it does not buy is more flying. The glacier landing flight is 42 minutes in the air inside a 1 h 12 m listing; a quarter of an hour of the remainder is the landing itself. If what you want is airborne time over ground you have not seen, a shorter flight without a landing gives you more minutes per dollar.

It means the aircraft sets down on high ground rather than on ice. The listing at $314 describes flying over lakes, over glaciers the description dates at 12,000 years old, and over the volcanic peaks that dot the region, and then landing on a mountain.

It is the most reviewed listing on this site: 169 reviews at 4.9. It is also $55 cheaper than the glacier landing, which for a lot of travellers is the whole argument. What you give up is the specificity. The glacier landing listing tells you the surface, the airborne minutes and the length of the stop; this one tells you the hour and leaves the rest to the day.

If you are choosing between the two landing Whistler heli tours purely on evidence, 169 reviews is more evidence than 114, and the scores are the same. If you are choosing on what is promised in writing, the glacier landing is the more specific listing of the two.

Across the six listings there are 388 reviews at a weighted 4.90. The two landing Whistler heli tours account for 283 of them — 169 and 114 — which is 73 per cent of every review written about flying out of Whistler on this site.

The remaining 105 are spread across the four flights that stay airborne: 45 on the Wedge Mountain route, 36 on the Summit flight, 21 on the Glaciers and Black Tusk route and three on the village flight. Three reviews is not a rating anybody should lean on, which is why the 3.7 attached to it is not compared with anything on this page.

Read that how you like, but read it carefully. A heavy review count tells you a listing sells, and both landing flights sell. It does not tell you the flight is better than a thinner one: the highest score on the site, 5.0, belongs to a flight with 36 reviews and no landing at all.

What the numbers do support is a plain statement: when people book Whistler heli tours and come back to write about them, they have usually booked one of these two.

The other four flights never open the door, and they are cheaper for it. A whistler heli ride of that kind is a straight sightseeing run: you take off, you fly the route, you come back to the same pad.

$251, 39-minute listing, 24 minutes in the air. Over Blackcomb Glacier Provincial Park. Rated 5.0, which is the highest score here, from 36 reviews.

$239, 40-minute listing, 25 minutes in the air. The village, the Peak to Peak Gondola, the Cheakamus Glacier, Garibaldi Lake and Black Tusk. 21 reviews at 4.9.

$159, 29-minute listing, 14 minutes in the air. Wedgemount Lake, Wedge Mountain and Wedge Glacier. 45 reviews at 4.9, and the lowest fare of the five glacier routes.

$152, 30 minutes on the listing. The village, the ski area and the backcountry. Its description does not mention a glacier, and its rating of 3.7 rests on three reviews, which is too thin to rank against anything else here.

Put against the landing flights, the trade is simple. $251 buys you 24 minutes above the ice; $369 buys you 42 minutes above it and fifteen standing on it.