As a non-skiing family who just wanted to give our kids some fun in the snow we thought a trip up to The Remarkables where they have tobogganing and a 'snow fun' area would be ideal...but sadly not. After misinterpreting the 'free shuttle bus from our carparks' we drove to their carpark (at the bottom of the hill) only to find that carpark required $15 from each of us to take the bus up...the same fare we could have paid in town.
We then waited over 30 minutes for a bus, which arrived with only 2 empty seats (there were 4 of us). While that bus was collecting 2 passengers a totally empty bus drove past the rest of us (about 15 people) and went up the mountain EMPTY! After another 10 minutes a bus turned up and were on our way (after a delay when our barcodes couldn't be read by the driver's scanner, resulting in quite a lot of swearing in front of our kids...not impressed.)
However the journey up was spectacular...great views.
When we got to the top we collected our toboggans ($30 EACH...for the same kind you can get at Kmart for $20) and went to find the snow play / toboggan area. It took some finding, partly through really poor signage, but also because it's TINY. One miniscule toboggan run and NOTHING ELSE. Seriously, the run is about 40m long and 5m wide. My kids did it 3 or 4 times and that was enough.
So, back down to the main building where we had a further $25 extracted for a can of soft drink, a coffee, a tea and 2 small portions of hot chips...all with the added bonus of needing to queue twice for more than 10 minutes each time (hot drinks are served from a different place to chips and soft drinks you see)
The cafeteria (yes, that's the best way to describe it) was PACKED. Having finished our refreshments we felt it was probably time to leave. It was 1.30pm and we'd been told that's when the buses would start to go down the mountain. We got to the buses just before 1.30 and were told that the first bus would only be going to hotels in town (the fact that it was half empty and had to go through the carpark at the bottom of the hill was logic which escaped the driver, so our 1.30 bus eventually became a 2.10 bus.
So, $145 for a family day out involving a bus ride, 400m on a toboggan and some underwhelming refreshments.
I'm sure that if skiing is your thing then The Remarkables is a good place to spend a day. However, if it's not, don't believe the website that it's a great place for a family day trip. It feels like an exercise in emptying your wallet from start to finish and with really poorly organised fundamentals (transport, signage, food) thrown in for good measure.