My wife and I recently took two weekend ski trips to Tahoe. Each time, we stayed in a Lake Tahoe vacation rental home with a group of friends.

We chose to all stay together in one cabin because although skiing takes most of the day, we all wanted to hang out in the late afternoons/evenings together and didn’t want to go to bars or cram all of us into one or two resort hotel rooms.

So after coming off Squaw Valley on the first trip, we relaxed at this rental home:

The group played games, watched TV and sat around talking in the living room. Then we used the kitchen to make meals together instead of eating out, which to me gets old fast on vacations—and saves money, too. This was great because in both cases there was a mixture of people that we knew well and people we were looking forward to getting to know better. And there’s no way to get to know people better than eating and just hanging out together.

When we go to the mountains, we also like to feel like we’ve gotten away from San Francisco, so we enjoyed having extras like a fireplace and the mountain/cabin decor, which added to the ambiance.

And since we like to go to Tahoe more than once every winter, cost does matter. For groups of friends, vacation rental homes are more reasonably priced than hotels, particularly this past weekend, where we had 15 people and spent around $50 per person per night for a bigger place.

Vacation rentals aren’t just perfect for families, they’re also ideal for situations where groups of friends go on a ski or beach vacation together. At least, they are for our friends.