AITAH for refusing to ski with child of wife's friend when it became clear they exaggerated his skill level?
I (48M) have a vacation house adjacent to a ski area. I've owned it since before I met my wife and had kids (11M and 13M). The kids have grown up skiing 25-35 days a year, do lots of lessons and as a result they are both excellent skiers.
My wife invited a colleague, "Annie", and her family, including a 12 year old son, "Tom", to come out after Christmas for a few days. My kids aren't friendly with Tom(to my wife's chagrin -- she is weirdly invested in being regarded by this woman as a friend and having a friendship between the kids would help), largely because the boy cannot help himself from trying to "one-up" all his peers, often with obvious fabulism. His parents tend to indulge his exaggerations. We've more than once heard how great he is at some skill or hobby, only to discover he is a notch above a tyro.
The parents want to spend their time out here cross-country skiing. My wife said she'd accompany them, and then "voluntold" me that I could take their son along with my kids when we were to go downhill skiing. My wife related that Jane told her Tom is a good skier. My kids both gave me a look. We all knew it is likely Tom is very far from a good skier. I told me wife I was not going to sacrifice our holiday ski time babysitting the son of a colleague I didn't want her to invite in the first place. She insisted I take him. The compromise we reached is that I would show Jane and Tom what sort of terrain we intended to ski. If they attested he could do it, I'd take him, but if it turned out he was not capable, she would need to pick him up and figure out what to do with him for the rest of the visit (for example, they could enroll him in skill-appropriate group lessons).
Just as my kids and I suspected, Jane and Tom told us he was an excellent skiers and would have no trouble keeping up. And likewise in line with our hunch, the moment we went to drop into a bowl, he freaked out and wouldn't do it.
I called my wife to come get him. She said they were mid cross-country and couldn't make it. I said that was not what we agreed. I took Tom to the lodge and put him in kinder-care.(which usually only goes up to age 7, but since I know a lot of the staff at the mountain, they took him), and left a voicemail for my wife to let her and Tom's parents know. We skied for 3 hrs and never heard from them. We stopped by kinder-care on the way out and Tom was still there, unhappy.
Jane, her husband and my wife were not happy when they finally got in touch and learned what I did. I told them that Tom was not capable of keeping up, that it's not surprising or a bad reflection on Tom, because my kids have had a very unusual amount of skiing experience. But the fact is that I was very clear about the difficulty level of what we intended to ski and we could have made other arrangements for Tom if they had been honest about his skill level.
So, was this an AH move or reasonable?
ADDING:
To clarify a few things. I did mention to my wife the possibility of getting Tom an instructor for the day, but she was kind of like, "no, let's see how it goes first, Annie says he is a good skier." Given that a 3hr private now costs around $400, i can see why Annie might not be enthusiastic about that. There are some "youth groups", too, but they have been long fully booked up.
I did get a short opportunity to see Tom ski easy terrain (on our way over to the lift that serves the bowl and on the road to the bowl) and he seemed like an intermediate skier. The bowl we were trying is the easiest on the mountain.