Top places for a winter skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps from luxury boltholes to family-friendly slopes
Modern skiing in Europe evolved largely in Switzerland in the late 19th century thanks to pioneering British visitors in classic resorts such as Davos, Wengen, Grindelwald and Mürren.
France, Austria and Italy attract the vast majority of British visitors each year, but while its Alpine neighbours has their own particular strength, in many respects Switzerland is hard to beat. It has an unfair share of the most dramatic mountain scenery, and ditto the most captivating traffic-free old mountain villages, some of the best mountain restaurants, and impressive ski runs. Most destinations can be reached directly by train from Geneva, Zermatt and other hub airports as rail travel becomes increasingly popular among skiers.
Sadly, with the Swiss Franc’s strength against the pound, prices for British visitors have become almost prohibitive in the big-name resorts. Even in the cheaper, lesser-known Swiss villages day-to-day costs on the ground are higher than in the average resort in Austria, France or Italy.
However, by shopping around carefully for budget-conscious accommodation and avoiding buying lunch on the mountain, it’s still possible to enjoy a superb ski holiday. Here’s our pick of 10 resorts that are definitely worth considering, by category.
Other Swiss resorts may match Verbier for luxurious chalets and hotels and vibrant après, but none quite have its cool cachet – and that’s largely because few can rival its challenging high-altitude terrain. Anyone who can handle Verbier’s itinerary routes, never mind its couloirs, can consider themselves pretty darn good.
The itineraries (which, though loosely marked, are not formally avalanche controlled or checked by the ski patrol) are where many experts spend their time, treating them like pistes. Epic highlights are the 900m-vertical route from Col des Gentianes to Tortin, and the 1,000m vertical Vallon d’Arby down to La Tzoumaz on the edge of the ski area.
The 80 lifts access more than 400km of runs, including some of the best lift-served off piste in the Alps. From Mont Gelé (3,025m) there are steeper itineraries and serious off-piste routes, while the top of Mont Fort (3,330m) offers a black mogul run on the front and adventurous off-piste routes off the back that end down in Siviez. An alternative front-face descent is by zip-wire – reaching speeds of 130kph.
The resort is a gentle sprawl of chalets, hotels and apartments, few of which are ski-in/ski-out – but the free ski bus system is generally efficient. Resort life revolves around the après hub of the Place Centrale, the main lift base at Médran 500m away, and the buzzing street between the two.
Experimental Chalet used to be Hotel Nevai and this centrally-located boutique hotel is still home to the Farm Club, which is probably Verbier’s most famous (and expensive) nightclub. It’s centrally located and the rooms are bright and airy. There’s a famous cocktail bar, a French restaurant run by Parisian chef Gregory Marchand, and a spa. From CHF 3815 per room/per week B&B, travel not included, booked direct. Find more of the best hotels and chalets in Verbier here.
Andermatt’s main mountain, Gemsstock, is an expert’s dream, with some seriously steep pistes and challenging off-piste routes. The resort is now in partnership with Vail and lifts are included in the multi-resort Epic Pass.
All of the main sectors in Zermatt have long, testing marked itinerary runs, there are also epic off-piste routes from several points. Zermatt also has one of Europe’s biggest heliskiing operations.
In St Moritz, ski trains and buses give fairly efficient access to a wide variety of intermediate slopes in six widely spread sectors. The two largest are Corviglia, accessed from town, and Corvatsch, a 25-minute free ski bus ride away. All sectors go up to around 3,000m, and afford fabulous panoramic views. The wide, open slopes above the treeline make for particularly attractive piste cruising.
St Moritz is famous for being the world capital of winter glitz, attracting a clientele with stratospheric income. However, with its 350km of sunny, reliably snowy pistes, there’s more to it than bling. The resort village is divided into two main parts. St Moritz Dorf is the largest and where most of the five-star hotels, swanky clubs and restaurants are located. Quieter St Moritz Bad has the cross-country track around St Moritz lake as its focal point.
Overall, the resort offers a huge range of quality leisure facilities, notably ice-skating, tobogganing, bobsleigh, and the famous Cresta Run for skeleton – which is, infamously, still only open to men. Most unusual is golf (using red balls), cricket, horse-racing, show jumping, and polo – all on the frozen lake.
Hotel Randolins is a three-star with a restaurant, sun terrace, spa, and shuttle bus service. It’s located 300 metres from the Chasellas chair-lift and close to the Suvretta Hotel. From CHF 1,145 per room/per week, B&B, not including travel, booked direct. Find more of the best hotels and chalets in St Moritz here.
Davos has an extensive network of linked intermediate pistes on offer in its six separate sectors of slopes, shared with its smaller neighbour Klosters. The main ski area, Parsenn, links the two resorts. Laax and neighbouring Flims share 224km of almost entirely intermediate slopes.
The gorgeous traffic-free village of Saas-Fee looks a bit like a small Zermatt with its age-blackened wooden chalets, and it is surrounded by magnificent glaciers and mountain peaks, including the Dom – the highest mountain located entirely within Switzerland. The ideal time to visit is later in the season, when the village gets a decent amount of sun.
The ski area is relatively small, with 100km of pistes, and best suited to beginners and intermediates. The nursery slopes are long, gentle, quiet and only a short walk from the main street – plus the glacier area and most of the top half of the mountain are ideal for beginners with glorious easy blue runs up at altitude. Even runs that are marked red here are generally very gentle, and would be classified blue in many resorts.
Saas-Fee has a friendly atmosphere and is good for families as there is plenty of après-ski entertainment to keep everyone occupied, including the state-of-the-art Aqua Allalin pool and spa complex. The Feeblitz Rodelbobbahn (a bobsleigh/rollercoaster hybrid) makes an excellent afternoon’s entertainment – especially when the weather closes in.
The Allalin Apartments are a 12-minute walk from the village centre. The three-star apartments are managed by the hotel of the same name and you can opt to eat in the hotel’s restaurant. Accommodation ranges from studios to two-bedroom flats. From £639, self-catering, with Inghams. Find more of the best accommodation in Saas-Fee here.
Villars is a reassuringly slow-paced resort where novices can make first turns in a relaxed, low-pressure atmosphere. The gentle nursery slope is at village level. Laax has plenty of long, easy blue runs from high on the mountain back to the village for beginners looking to move on from the nursery slopes.
The largest and most attractive of the four resorts in the beautiful Val d’Anniviers, Grimentz shares a ski area with linked Zinal. Nearby St Luc and Chandolin are also included on the lift pass. Grimentz has the most restaurants, bars and accommodation. It is reached by a dramatic winding road that zigzags up from Sierre in the Rhone Valley, fringed with sheer drop-offs. The reward for this scary initiation is the feeling of discovering a secret Alpine hideaway. The village has a charming centre with ancient wooden chalets as well as some 1970s additions that are less appealing – think uncommercialised Zermatt on a much smaller scale.
Even though these days Grimentz is not so secret, its offbeat location means that it has not been overexploited by the demands of tourism and it is all the better for it. The ski areas total 210km of pistes. Grimentz-Zinal is on one side of the valley while St Luc-Chandolin is on the other. It’s best to have a car to get between the two ski areas as the bus service isn’t great.
Together, the ski areas offer the quantity and variety of pistes needed for a full week’s entertainment. While there is a substantial amount of easy and intermediate terrain in the area, the steeps and off piste are big attractions. The World Cup black run at Grimentz, is a proper challenge, but it pales into insignificance when compared with the black Piste du Chamois on the Zinal side. The winching of a piste-bashing machine here is an impressive testament to Swiss engineering expertise. The off-piste opportunities to be discovered with a mountain guide are stupendous. For the less gung-ho, St Luc is home to more benign runs against a quite beautiful Alpine backdrop.
Les Vieux Chalets No 7 is a two-storey top-floor apartment with four bedrooms sleeping eight in Grimentz. It’s 200m from the main Bendolla gondola to the slopes. From £1,799 per week in total for eight guests self-catering, travel not included, with Mountain Heaven.
Mürren is pretty, with narrow lanes lined by small chalets at an altitude high enough to more or less guarantee snow on the rooftops. It’s also car-free. Saas-Fee is traffic-free aside from its electric carts and taxis, and the buildings are mainly in traditional Alpine style – look up, and tumbling glaciers loom above.
Après that starts on the mountain in mid-afternoon is a well-known feature of Austrian resorts, and is being propagated in big-name French resorts through the Folie Douce franchise – but it’s arguably been going on in Zermatt as long as anywhere in the cute huts that dot the lower part of the Matterhorn sector of slopes.
These days, it isn’t just amiable sing-songs fuelled by schnapps concoctions. Bars such as the Hennu Stall at the bottom of the Matterhorn sector and Cervo at the bottom of Sunnegga have live bands generating an atmosphere to rival anything in St Anton.
Later on, Zermatt suits all tastes, from the panelled Elsie’s Bar for a glass of wine (and maybe oysters or snails), to the popular Papperla Pub, to having your eardrums assaulted in one of the various venues in the Hotel Post.
Zermatt has lots of other attractions too – 200km of varied, extensive slopes linked to those of Cervinia in Italy (another 160km) and testing off-piste itinerary runs; heliskiing on tap; quality mountain restaurants; a characterful, car-free village; and, naturally, fabulous views of the Matterhorn from around almost every corner
Argos is a self-contained apartment on the ground floor of Chalet Ulysse and is a five-minute walk from the Matterhorn Express gondola station, with the possibility of skiing back to within 200m of the door for much of the winter. It has two double bedrooms, a large bathroom, and a south-facing living room. From CHF 3,300pw/for a self-catered apartment for four people with Matterhorn Chalets, not including travel. Find the best hotels and chalets in Zermatt here.
Verbier presents the full range of après options, starting with lively bars on the mountain and progressing through to happy-hour live bands and seriously expensive night clubs. Laax has succeeded in attracting lots of young people, mainly snowboarders, who fill the bars early and late, particularly at the Laax lift base.
Essentially car-free (with the exception of taxis), Wengen might have been specially designed for families. At its heart there’s a snow-covered field that serves as a combined playground and gentle nursery slope. For children progressing beyond this stage, one of the two ways up the mountain is by cog railway that also gives access to the village from Lauterbrunnen down in the valley. The other main lift is the speedier Männlichen cable car.
The village sits on a sunny shelf and is made up of a mix of small chalets and bigger, more institutional-looking hotels. Wengen shares a ski area with Grindelwald, and most of the slopes are above its neighbour – lovely long red and blue runs under the towering north face of the Eiger. The Jungfrau region lift pass covers the slopes of neighbouring Mürren as well as Wengen and Grindelwald – 210km of pistes in total. Lift passes are free for the under sixes, and reduced up to age 19. Over 62 year olds also benefit from reduced prices.
There are plenty of family-friendly activities on offer, including 50km of toboggan runs. The most popular of these is the 4.5km run from Wengernalp down to the train station in town, but there are also long runs from the top of the mountain going in the opposite direction towards Grindelwald. In the middle of the village there’s indoor curling and outdoor skating.
Hotel Caprice is a small boutique hotel that is a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World and is comfortable and relaxed with excellent cuisine. Weather-permitting, you can ski back to the hotel. From £1,089 with Sno. Find more of the best hotels in Wengen here.
Arosa is a child-friendly wintersports village with an unintimidating ski area, traditionally enjoyed by all family members – be they toddlers, skaters, cross-country enthusiasts, walkers, and alpine skiers. If you stay in participating hotels and apartments you can benefit from free ski school lessons for the under 17s.
Andermatt sits in a prime high altitude position for attracting snow cover. On one of its two separate ski areas, steep and shady Gemsstock, most of the slopes are between 2,000m and 3,000m.
There’s often high-quality conditions in Andermatt when cover in the Valais region – Switzerland’s main concentration of major resorts – is mediocre. Although it does have several intermediate pistes, Gemsstock is really an expert’s mountain. The main face of 900m vertical consists almost entirely of black runs and off-piste routes to mid-mountain, and the one run to the valley is also a black, although an easy one.
However, Andermatt’s other sector, Nätschen-Gütsch-Sedrun, has a whole expanse of intermediate slopes, bringing the total pistes on offer in Andermatt to 120km. A network of modern lifts and pistes links Nätschen-Gütsch with Sedrun, 15km away to the east, the link being part of an ongoing £1.2 billion redevelopment of the resort, backed by Swiss-educated billionaire Egyptian entrepreneur Samih Sawiris. Once only linked by train, there is now a series of red and blue pistes and lifts including six-seater chairs and a fast 10-person gondola from Oberalppass to Schneehüenerstock. Vail Resorts has now acquired a controlling share in the resort’s development and the transaction includes a £130 million investment in the skiing infrastructure and guest experience, as well as the wider Andermatt Swiss Alps real estate business. Andermatt-Sedrun ski area now offers unlimited access to Epic Pass holders, the first resort in Europe to do so.
The Radisson Blu Hotel Reusson in Andermatt is a modern hotel set in a new enclave with shops and restaurants, a short walk from the railway station. A shuttle bus will take you to and from the lifts. From £1,911per room/per week, B&B, not including travel, booked direct.
With its village at 1,500m and slopes up to 3,330m, Verbier’s altitude ensures there’s a strong chance of good snow throughout the season. Engelberg is a favourite of Zürich weekenders. Not far north of Andermatt, it has a similarly well-deserved reputation for snow – although the village is quite low, most of the slopes are high (up to 3,030m).
The ski area shared by the villages of Laax, Flims and Falera targets a youthful market, and the area’s key appeal lies in its four terrain parks, high up on Crap Sogn Gion (the local dialect generates some awkward names – Crap translates as “peak”).
In total the parks have almost 90 features such as rails, boxes and kickers as well as two halfpipes (the larger one is the world’s biggest, a massive 200m long, 22m wide and 6.90m high). The resort also has an indoor freestyle facility at the Freestyle Academy, with a skate bowl, ramps, jumps, trampoline, foam pit and airbag.
The 224km ski area also has lots to offer freeriders, with a good range of ungroomed but marked and patrolled freeride runs, as well as vast off-piste areas. However the sunny orientation of the slopes means snow conditions can be highly variable, especially late in the season.
There’s a wide choice of places to stay, from the quiet backwaters of Falera and Laax Dorf to the roadside hotels of Flims Dorf, the wooded seclusion of Flims Waldhaus or at the Laax lift base.
wellnessHostel3000 is a hostel with a difference – it has a swimming pool, bar and restaurant, and bedrooms range from double rooms to dormitories sleeping six. A ski bus takes you to and from the lifts, ten minutes away. From £1,276, B&B, with Heidi.
Davos is a great area for freeriders when the snow is good, with long runs from the top of the mountains down to the valley, but its appeal to freestylers is equally compelling – the Jakobshorn sector has an extensive terrain park and a superpipe. Saas Fee has plenty of wide, well-groomed pistes and an impressively big and varied terrain park up on the glacier.
The key to getting value for money, particularly in Switzerland, is to steer clear of the high-profile, fashionable resorts. In this respect, it’s hard to beat Leysin. It’s known as a resort for schoolchildren and also snowboarders, mainly for the reason that prices here are lower than in the big, well-known resorts.
Drinks in particular are reasonably priced by Swiss standards. Originally, Leysin was the setting for tuberculosis sanitoriums, thanks to its sunny climate and proximity to Geneva, about a 90-minute drive away. These days it’s a traditional ski resort with chalets scattered across a sunny meadow, although a few larger buildings of institutional architectural style bear witness to its health-tourist history. A cable car and a quad chair provide main mountain access from the edge of the village.
The slopes best suit beginners to intermediates, with 100km of pistes going up to 2,200m and a terrain park with areas to suit all levels plus a halfpipe that’s good enough to host the Junior World Snowboard Championships in halfpipe each January. There is also a 7km cross-country track meandering through the forest. The lift pass includes nearby Villars and Les Diablerets.
Residence Castel Club Leysin Parc is 10 minutes’ walk from the resort centre, and offers studios and apartments with mountain views. Studios have a separate eating area with cable satellite TV and a sofa, plus a kitchenette with microwave. From £705 per room/per week,in a self-catered economy studio, not including travel, booked direct.
Engelberg has a relatively low international profile, and three-star hotels outnumber four-stars eight to one. Local prices are about as low as Swiss resort prices go. Andermatt has undergone a lot of change of late with upmarket new developments, but the original old village still offers modest hotels and prices (for Switzerland).
Grabbing a quick weekend at short notice when snow conditions are good is a very appealing prospect. Crans-Montana is a great place for a bit of short-break indulgence, with a wide choice of seriously good hotels and restaurants, and it is easily reached from Geneva. Trains run from the airport to the valley town of Sierre, from where a funicular zips up to Montana, a total transfer time of about two hours and 40 minutes.
Last-minute weekends are a particularly good idea because while it has a scenic, extensive and varied ski area, virtually all its slopes face south or south west. This means that although around a third of its 140km of slopes are covered by snowmaking, it is exceptionally vulnerable to the sun after midwinter. Booking a week-long holiday here can mean risking poor snow conditions.
It’s a big place – a merging of the two towns of Crans and Montana with centres a mile apart – in a prettily wooded setting. The panoramic views are fabulous, particularly from the mountain restaurant terraces, but it does lack resort-village atmosphere. For ski tourers, there are 15 uphill ski touring routes ranging from easy to difficult
Hotel Art de Vivre is a small hotel with just 24 rooms. It has a swimming pool, sauna and hot tub, as well as wonderful views. From £1,410, B&B, with Ski Solutions. Find more of the best hotels and chalets in Crans-Montana here.
Villars is just over two hours from Geneva airport by train. The slopes, though rather limited for a week-long holiday for those beyond beginner level, have plenty to offer for a weekend. Champéry is about two and a half hours from Geneva airport by train. Champéry is the main resort on the Swiss side of the cross-border Portes du Soleil circuit, which also takes in Avoriaz and Châtel in France.
Unless stated otherwise, package prices are per person, based on two sharing a double or twin room, half-board, for seven nights, including flights and transfers.
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