Well, it's not as simple as 1 or 2. As eheath said unfortunately that ski manufacturers cannot financially assume the shipping cost associated with all warranty claims, that's just how it is so that's not going to change.
But that being said, I can understand the customer's perspective too, and having worked years ago for a large online retailer and sometimes handled warranty claims, I often sympathized with customers.
You always have abusers trying to cheat the system for a freebie, sure, fuck these guys, but you also have the guy who paid $500 for skis that fall apart after a couple of weeks, and they don't understand why they now have to pay an extra 15% on top of that for shipping to get what they already paid for: a ski they can use. Their perspective is that this defect is not their fault, if it's anyone's, it's the manufacturer, so the manufacturer should assume all costs associated with replacing the defective ski, not them. Which in my opinion is not unreasonable either.
But OP no way around it, except as eheath pointed out, depending on where you got the skis from, sometimes shops have more flexible return policies, I know we ended up implementing a policy where we assumed all shipping costs for warranty claims as long as the warranty claim ended up being accepted by the manufacturer, if not the customer was on the hook for shipping. That dissuaded the abusers from making claims while not putting additional financial burden on legit claims.
