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ABOUT OUR CHALETS
For the last ten years or so we British have been the Americans of the Alps, the people who always had the most money. We left the biggest tips. We bought two bottles of claret while the French took a bottle of plonk. Restaurants refused locals if they thought Brits might book. An ordinary ski instructor who speaks English earns over €60 per hour, while even a world-class coach gets €40 if he teaches in French. And we’ve pushed up property prices and rents to the point where this resort which only had half a dozen chalets a generation ago now has scores, and what was once the smartest chalet in town is now used for staff accommodation!

The new chalets are seriously luxurious. Swimming pools and wellness centres; hot tubs and heated balconies (so the butler doesn’t have to shovel…).

Might this be the season which evens things up? Sterling is not what it was, and people have less of it. We don’t think that many skiers will simply stop coming, even if their bonus has gone from six figures to no figures, and we don’t believe they will head for the cheaper resorts, where one pays half as much for a quarter as much.

But we do think that this could be the season when guests compare prices quite carefully.

At YSE we have a range of chalets, from very comfortable to egregiously opulent.

The smartest costs almost twice as much as the simplest, but we don’t aim for people with more money than sense. We wonder if we shoot ourselves in the foot sometimes by being too cheap!

Knowing we will fill pretty much every week of Val d’Isère’s five-month season, we can share the rent among more guests than most tour operators, and keep our prices reasonable. The usual trick is to add a few hundred pounds to the price so one can advertise last-minute discounts and still make money. That way the customers who book in advance subsidise the bargain hunters who don’t care where they go so long as they get a deal. We rarely give discounts, since our brochure prices are not inflated.

Our most expensive chalet is a top-floor apartment, en-suite throughout, in a newly-refurbished building on the nursery slopes. The least expensive is several top-floor apartments with a bathroom for every three guests in a slightly older building near the nursery slopes… The service, food and wine are the same in all of our chalets. Only the degree of comfort and the location vary.

Although there is no hotel in Val d’Isère where you would be more comfortable or spoilt, YSE chalets are not intended to feel like hotels. Instead of dozens of rooms, all identical, you’ll find just a few, often quite varied. Instead of faceless kitchen staff and nameless chambermaids, we have chefs and chalet staff you’ll automatically be on first-name terms with, and glad to meet up the mountain or in some smoky dive.

This informality is one of the keys to a successful chalet holiday. Eating and drinking well is another. If you scroll down a couple more pages you can read about our food and wine, and the staff who prepare them.

We aim for restaurant-quality cooking and hotel-standard cleaning, and we select, train and supervise our staff accordingly. If this isn’t quite right for you, we offer all sorts of cost-price options, from superior wine to daily linen changes, from taxis to the slopes to champagne up the slopes, enabling us to tailor your holiday to your requirements.

But none of this will make you happy if you are a cantankerous old curmudgeon, who never wanted to come in the first place! Enjoying the company of friends or family is half the point. YSE won’t subject you to the quizzes or pub crawls beloved of some tour operators, but you still need to be vaguely sociable. Even in a chalet for four there are three other people’s holidays to ruin, and a chalet girl who’ll dine out on your grumpiness for twenty years!

No YSE chalet is inconvenient for skiing. The two furthest from the centre have a Land Rover shuttle, while guests in most of the others can be on a lift within minutes of leaving their door, and some step straight onto the snow.

When you step back, of course, it is more comfortable for everyone if you can leave the snow outside. We recommend you bring some sort of indoor footwear, so you can take your Uggs off at the door.

Like any house, chalets can have the occasional technical problem. There are few buildings in Val d’Isère, new or old, which don’t need a plumber or electrician at least once during the long winter. But YSE’s reps and repairmen never sleep (or if they do, there’s a phone by the bed), so whilst we cannot promise you’ll never need to call for help, we can guarantee that it will arrive rapidly. This is a promise we can only make because the YS of YSE is available all winter.

We have stayed in most of our chalets, and would not be offering them to you if we hadn’t enjoyed them greatly. But please note that they are all different. Some are on the slopes. Some are close to the action. Some are ideal for families. Some suit people who stay in every evening. Some have close neighbours, and are not recommended for party animals. With twenty-six chalets to choose from, we probably have one of the right size and price for your group.

We have described them with tedious accuracy, with the dimensions of every room, and if you need still more information, the team in our Sherborne office know the chalets inside out. Please wade through the blurb, and ensure that your party all know what you are booking. They’ll merrily leave all the work to you, then blame you when they find you’ve booked a chalet they can’t ski back to when they’ve forgotten their sunglasses…

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FOOD AND WINE
Eating and drinking may not be the most important things on your ski holiday. Good snow, fine weather, comfy boots, not finding out that the friend you intended to ski with wears a technicolor one-piece – these are what will make or break the trip.

But food is an obsession with us. It is the one thing we control totally. Most guests wouldn’t blame us if it snowed every day, they got sunburn or their spouse eloped with a ski instructor, but if dinner weren’t the perfect end to a good day, or antidote to a bad one, they wouldn’t come again.

We start with a proper breakfast. Fruit juice, porridge, Dorset cereals, bacon, eggs, baguettes straight from the famous local bakery, a croissant or pain au chocolat if you like, yogurts, British tea and fresh coffee from Italian espresso pots (with Nescafé and bizarre infusions for those who prefer them). If that’s not what you consider a proper breakfast, please see our Heart-Attack Breakfast option (click here).

You return from the slopes to find bread and jam, a freshly-baked cake, hot chocolate etc. left out for you.

Dinner is where we pull out all the stops. Our policy on food is straightforward. We start with the best cuts of meat and the best fresh fruit and vegetables, not really counting the cost. Everything one needs is available in Val d’Isère.

Nightly canapés are followed by a three-course, fixed-menu, dinner-party-style meal. The cuisine is largely French, though with a fusion of other influences – what Londoners call Modern British. (Foreign, in other words.)

We then check with you that we are on the right track for your party. If you prefer steak and kidney pie to boeuf en croûte, we are delighted to cook it. If you want more or less, or hotter or colder, or earlier or later, just tell us.

This is YSE’s eighteenth winter, and we honestly believe that our cooking has steadily improved from year to year. We aren’t sure why. More professional chefs work for us, but even the cooks who’ve just learnt from their mothers or on cookery courses seem to master dishes now they wouldn’t have attempted in the past.

Our pre-season in situ training course gives the cooks between two and four weeks of hands-on cooking practice – more than they’d do in a year at cooking school. This is indispensable, even for experienced chefs, at 6,000 feet, where nothing cooks the same as at sea level.

With dinner, we serve free unlimited quantities of a selection of very drinkable French AOC wines and vins de pays. This is, unfortunately, only with dinner, not breakfast, and we stop serving the wine when the coffee appears.

We also have a wine list from which you can buy everything from slightly smarter wines to Châteaux Lafite-Rothschild or d’Yquem. We sell these wines at less than they cost, because you are not drinking the house wine. The more you consume the more you save. Drink enough and you’ve paid for the holiday.

For £25 pppw, which goes straight to the cook, those guests who do not eat the same food as the rest of the chalet can take our Different Diets option (click here). And if you prefer Krug Grande Cuvée to our normal Dom Pérignon, just give the girls the dosh. They’ll be happy to get some in for you (and to help you drink it).

We are confident that you’ll eat at least as well in our chalets as in any of the local restaurants or hotels. But the toughest comparisons tend to be with previous YSE holidays. ‘Yes, she’s a wonderful cook, but you can’t beat Felicity’s roasted grapes last year, or Scotty’s Thai prawn soup the year before.’ It keeps us on our toes…

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YSE STAFF
YSE’s staff are the best in the business.

Every travel firm comes out with stuff like that, of course, which must really irritate the customers, who know that the brochure was printed before the staff were employed, and that it is waffle!

What we really mean is that our staff always have been the best in the business, that the company with the best selection of chalets in Europe’s best ski resort wouldn’t last long if they weren’t, and that as usual, this year, finding, training, motivating, supervising and keeping the best staff in the business will be our main task.

The first people you will have to deal with are in the UK office. It may be safe to book a hotel holiday through any high-street travel agent, relying on the hotel’s star rating. But chalets are all different, and the rooms in each chalet vary greatly. You need to speak to someone informed.

So you may be reassured to hear that our office staff all know Val d’Isère and our chalets inside out. Fiona Easdale, the E of YSE, runs the UK office with the same commitment with which she ran the gates in the 1976 Winter Olympics, and we take great pride in our reputation for giving honest, accurate information and for not trying to sell you something at all costs. (Our girls do not work on commission.)

For any chalet holiday firm, its resort team is its greatest asset. There is no lack of smart chalets nowadays, but there is a huge shortage of good staff to run them.

Anybody in Val d’Isère will tell you how good YSE’s resort staff are. Over 70% of our bookings are from former guests or their friends, and the vast majority of our guests go home satisfied. A significant proportion re-book the next day. This is entirely thanks to our staff.

We probably start with the best applicants. Working for a small, tightly-run firm only appeals to people who want to be part of a competent, dedicated team. Cool dudes who reckon the world owes them a paid ski holiday don’t even waste their time applying.

We like our new staff to be as skilled and calm as the regulars by the time their first guests arrive, so they spend from two to four weeks before the season practising.

‘This winter, more than ever of our key chefs and chalet girls are coming back. So we can guarantee some extraordinarily good cuisine, and also presume that our team enjoyed last season.

While you neither know nor care if the staff in a hotel are happy, you do in a chalet. A chef or chalet girl on the point of resignation cooks badly, cleans worse, and can turn the milk sour on your Dorset Cereals!

To be sure of both catching the best staff and keeping them on-side until May, we pay above-average wages, with a large end-of-season bonus, lodge our team well, and supply ski passes and good skis.

We help them get the most from their season with everything from free ski lessons to discounts on shampoo, and help sort out anything from uptight guests to overtight ski boots.

John Yates-Smith, the YS of YSE, is always in the resort, not just to supervise our team, but also in case they need help, fall ill or just feel homesick. While the norm is to lose between 50% and 75% of one’s staff over a season, we average 5%.

And we are famous for having civilised guests. Meeting pleasant people is a major reason to do a season. One chef told us that his least loveable YSE guest was still nicer than the nicest client on his charter yacht. (We would have to ask anyone mean to our staff to leave, though it hasn’t happened in seventeen years!)

Whilst we have strong opinions on food, and never let cooks loose on guests until we are happy with everything they do, we leave our staff a free hand to cook what they like cooking or, more importantly, what their guests want to eat.

So you won’t see the cooking-by-numbers, with six fixed menus and pre-ordained shopping lists, which is the stroke of genius by which some of our competitors turn school leavers into chefs.

In order to keep all of our promises without wearing our team out, we also have a high ratio of staff to guests. This means that neither illness nor injury can leave you cooking your own breakfast, except on the staff’s weekly day off.

With so many regular guests, we are under enormous pressure to maintain quality. Having John on hand (and, in particular, his deputy Annabel Clifton) helps us do so, but to be sure we take your feedback on the day you leave. Praise and gratitude are passed on, while any suggestion or criticism is debated at great length and acted on if possible.

If our staff this winter are not the best in the business, we will be very surprised.

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CHILDREN
Skiing is the perfect family holiday.

What else is there that the whole family can do together, mothers as well as fathers, girls and boys equally? Or where parents can hand their children over to trained professionals, knowing they’ll be even happier and safer than with them? Skiing is both exciting and healthy – a rare combination – yet one need not be particularly fit or sporty to enjoy it.

YSE is sometimes considered less than child-friendly, because we don’t have nannies or crèches, or give massive discounts for children.

It is true that we feel that childcare is something best left to parents or professionals, not played at by tour operators. And while a child’s holiday costs us as much as an adult’s, we don’t see how we could expect those travelling without children to subsidise those with.

But YSE holidays are actually extremely well-suited to families. Some of our chalets are large, some of them are small. Some are very smart, some give very good value. And some have extra beds for children at half the normal price (though please note that we cannot always include flight seats: please call us for details).

Chalets are more relaxing for families than hotels, where parents are constantly worried that their brood will upset fellow guests, or self-catering apartments, where most of someone’s holiday will be spent shopping, cooking and clearing up.

And, perhaps surprisingly, Val d’Isère is the ideal family ski resort. It has good snow, short queues, wide nursery slopes with free lifts, a flat village, free and frequent buses, very good ski schools, English-speaking instructors, and lots of British youngsters. Where to Ski and Snowboard describes the nursery slopes as ‘95% perfect’.

And although we are keen skiers ourselves, our best moments are skiing with our children. The only thing we can imagine that would be even more fun than seeing one’s kids learn to ski would be to learn with them. A family who started skiing together would have a ball.

However, although a successful family ski holiday is the best thing in the world, a lot can go wrong, and it can be a catastrophe. A ski holiday with children needs to be planned like an assault on Everest.

Fiona Easdale in our office can advise on most aspects of ski school and childcare, having brought her own offspring to Val d’Isère as babies, toddlers and schoolchildren. She now has a teenager, and is becoming an authority on skiing while communicating in grunts.

Her first tip will be to leave small children behind! Her second will be to throw money at childcare or kids’ lessons rather than on unnecessarily smart accommodation. We see children with their own en-suite marble bathroom dumped in group lessons where they understand little and learn less. They are miserable, yet a week’s private instruction wouldn’t have cost much more than the bathroom.

Not that we want you to send us less money, of course, but happy children mean happy parents, and that’s good business!

Ski schools get booked out, so if you require lessons for your children, we strongly recommend that you read pages 64–65 of our brochure, or see the relevant section under Val d’Isère on this website, and telephone or e-mail direct on the day you book your holiday to be sure of a place in a class or to reserve a private instructor. We see family holidays ruined because classes are full and no instructors free.

Private lessons are not very expensive if you can get a small group of children together, and they make life much easier. The instructor may meet the children at the chalet, for example.

Snow Fun, Evolution 2 and Oxygène specialise in looking after English-speaking youngsters during British school holidays, and can usually include lunch. For more details, please see our ski school details on the Val d'Isère section of this website.

Getting children ready for skiing always takes longer than one imagines. It helps to be in a chalet whence getting them to the slopes does not require Sherpas. Several of ours are on the slopes, near the lifts, while none is too inconvenient. The Sassières are our furthest from the slopes, but have their own Land Rover.

Young children who need an early supper tend not to eat it if they’ve just had afternoon tea. Our staff return to work at around 6pm, and can serve a child-friendly high tea from 6.30. Some parents ask us to prepare a meal and leave it for them to pop in the oven earlier than that. If your children have particular likes or dislikes (don’t they all?), please fax or e-mail them to us so our staff can buy the right food.

Children's clothes need to be warmer than adults’, ideally one-piece suits, perhaps sprayed with silicone. Mittens are warmer than gloves. Your children will almost certainly need two pairs, at least, because even if they don’t keep falling over, they’ll probably soak their mittens throwing snowballs! You can buy disposable hand and footwarmers from the ski shops and chemists.

They also need a selection of clothes and socks or tights to adjust the temperature beneath their suits. A cagoule might be useful, and a balaclava is a must.

Children should wear helmets, which we advise you to pre-book from the ski-hire shops (and to adjust to their heads). With the helmet they wear goggles, but once they stop for lunch, they remove the helmet and goggles, and need a hat or cap and wraparound sunglasses that stay on.

Children need easily applied sun block (you can ask the instructor to re-apply it) and lip salve with a sun screen.

Precision rent out ski clothes, but only have a small selection. If you wish to hire children’s clothes, you need to act fast. Skis and boots are no problem, though we recommend you pre-book equipment if you’re coming during school holidays.

We list the shops with discounts for YSE on the Val d'Isère section of this website, under Ski Hire. Sport 2000 is near Le Grizny; Mattis is at La Daille. The rest are more or less central. Just book – don’t pay, unless you’ve got a better deal than ours. To book skis, tell them the child’s height. For boots, the shoe size. Doing so merely gives the shop an idea of what to put aside: they will still fit the equipment properly on arrival.

Toddlers and babies are very trendy on a ski holiday, but don’t really gain much from it themselves. Most of them never leave the chalet. Those that do wish they hadn’t. Some nearly-three year-olds manage a little skiing, but normally it will involve being carried up the nursery slopes and released to schuss and crash.

In our experience, tobogganing with under-fives usually ends in tears and can be seriously dangerous!

Small children are much more likely to end up at the doctor’s. The dry air, central heating, cold and ultra-violet can all affect them. Chalets have fireplaces, staircases and stone floors they may not be accustomed to. And it is a long journey for the baby, its parents, and anyone near them on the aircraft or coach…

Looking after children is always risky. Most children who get injured do so in their home, with their parents. Nannies are probably less likely to be distracted than parents, but chalets were never intended to be nurseries, are normally less child-friendly than one’s own home, and are difficult to make entirely safe.

For under-threes we think the best for the child and you is someone the child knows, who travels and stays with you. It’s what grandparents were made for.

Alternatively, there is a nanny company called Valtina, which our guests have found excellent. Prices range from €80 for half a day to €761 for a week. The website is www.valtina-childcare.com, the email tina@valtina-childcare.com, and the phone number 0033 679 76 95 95. Some of their people are just mums – not trained nannies – but the consensus was that they were very good. The Tourist Office has a list of baby-sitters, though they are not vetted.

It is your responsibility to talk to whoever may be arranging your childcare, meet the carer and go around the chalet with them to satisfy yourself that they can keep your children safe in it.

Our chalet girls are always impecunious and sensible, and can often be persuaded to help, but they have their own work, and are rarely experienced with small children. Again, any such arrangement is entirely the parents’ responsibility.

If you bring a buggy, it needs to have big wheels to get across snow. But children are better off indoors: a walk with a buggy along the valley floor inevitably involves half with the child facing into the blinding sun and half with it looking the other way, normally north, into the wind. It is uncomfortable and dangerous. The locals never expose small children for long to freezing air or neat UV. Only we Brits do that! Backpacks and papooses are great until you slip on the ice. And if you were thinking of carrying them on your back while you ski, DON’T! Small children are happiest riding on the bus…

Three or four-year olds vary hugely. Some will schuss black runs. Some will sit down and cry. Most can learn to go up the baby pomas on the nursery slopes and the basics of skiing. Getting a good instructor is the secret to a successful holiday. Contact the ski schools as early as possible to be sure of a place in the right class or, if you are reserving a private instructor, to get their best person. Fiona knows a number of excellent teachers.

Lessons will only last about two hours each day, so unless parents of small children have help, most of their holiday will be devoted to child-minding (please see our comments in the previous section).

The French section of the Snow Fun ski school (00 33 479 06 16 79) provides the Teddy Bear Club, which costs €30 for 90 minutes. Children seem happier than at the children’s garden of the ESF (00 33 479 06 02 34 – about €38 for two hours).

There are a selection of times available through the day, particularly for the Teddy Bear Club, but with only six per class they do get booked solid. These lessons must be booked in advance.

The Village d’Enfants, Val d’Isère’s skiing kindergarten (00 33 479 40 09 81), is right on the nursery slopes, where the buses turn. It looks after children, all nationalities, aged three to 13 while they aren’t actually skiing, and has brilliant facilities indoors and out, including a canteen, dormitories and a play area on the snow. The staff have been really nice thus far, if with slightly Allo Allo! English. It has been very popular with outgoing children.

Near our chalets Juniper, Jasmine and Jacaranda is Le Petit Poucet (0033 479 06 13 97, www.garderielepetitpoucet.com), a nursery which takes children from three years. The cost is €48 for a day and €35 for half a day (including meals). It will transport children to and from ESF, EV2 or Snow Fun group ski school classes, but you pay for the nursery while your child is at ski school as well as for the actual lessons. It has to be pre-booked, with a certificate from your GP to say that the child is in good health.

Bigger children, once they’ve turned five, are much easier. They can now cope with a whole day on skis, leaving you with the choice of how much time to spend with them. Some of the ski schools will provide lunch, but need much persuasion to confirm it for any given date.

Morning or afternoon group lessons (the latter tend to be warmer, cheaper and less subscribed, but obviously your child may be more tired if he or she has skied with you in the morning), can be great with an inspired instructor. Prices for group and private lessons for various ski schools are listed on pages 64–65 of our brochure, and on the Ski School section of this website, attached to the Val d’Isère page. They vary hugely, per child, per hour – and sometimes five children in a private lesson in one school work out cheaper than a group lesson at another.

When you ski with your children, you’ll find lots of long, exciting circuits they can manage, all on green and blue runs. Rapid chairs, such as the new Marmottes six-seater, have made the Verte and similar runs much more child-friendly.

Teenagers who have been perfectly behaved for months at school will be desperate to let off steam. During the day this seems to mean dressing with their crutch around their knees to ride snowboards and glare at anyone over 21.

After dinner, of course, it means sampling every forbidden pleasure possible out on the town. Under-18s often gain illicit entry to night clubs, but sometimes don’t. The former might worry parents, the latter drives teenagers crazy. At night during school holidays Val d’Isère echoes to smart voices fortified with chalet wine discussing how to get into Dick’s through the fire escape! And that’s just the 13-year-olds… Still, they’re going to test the limits, and Val d’Isère is a fairly benign place to do so.

If you are bringing youngsters to a top chalet, please bear in mind that the smarter the chalet the easier it is to damage and the more the damage costs to put right. We have to repair any damage for subsequent guests, and have to ask the parents for the money, which is never easy.

YSE is not anti-children. Far from it, we are working on the 2022 Winter Olympic squad right now. But we know how much wear and tear a child can inflict with a plastic cup, let alone a felt-tip! Toddlers are the worst, but teenagers aren’t far behind, and the Oxford and Cambridge ski teams were the first children we had to ban.

We only accept bookings including anyone under 18 in our more expensive chalets with a deposit of £1000. We debit your card just before departure and credit it on your return. If you are the group leader, you’ll be surprised how much easier it is to stop friends’ children destroying the chalet when they know we hold a substantial chunk of your dosh…

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TRAVEL
London to Val d’Isère in five hours

In a former life, the YS of YSE had to try to limit the travel chaos of a major ski tour operator, while the E had to answer the hundreds of complaints each week about it! So when we set up YSE, hassle-free transport was one of our main aims.

On winter Saturdays, the airports, skies and roads are gridlocked, while the pistes are practically empty. On Sundays, travel is a joy, but the slopes are at their busiest. So we travel on Sundays. And with just one flight serving only Val d’Isère, we can guarantee no waiting around for other aircraft or resorts.

We constantly look for ways to make our travel arrangements even more painless. Every year we consider different airports, airlines and schedules. We’ve thought about trains, but the Eurostar is slower and more expensive than our flight, and either gets you to Val d’Isère too early to get into your chalet or too late to sort out equipment.

In the end, we have stuck to the same airline, in spite of their changing their name from Britannia to Thomsonfly, and with the same 10am take-off as ever, because it is the perfect time: the last of the first wave of flights, which have not yet done a rotation and picked up delays. Check-in opens at 7.00am.

We have stayed with Gatwick, which for all its faults is the most convenient airport for the majority of our guests. It’s not too bad on a Sunday.

And we are delighted to be staying with Grenoble. The journey to Val d’Isère is fractionally quicker than from Lyon, and quite a lot quicker than from Geneva. Grenoble is a little airport with a very long runway and an outstanding weather record.

But what we really like is the speed with which everything happens. Passengers are off the plane in no time, and bags quickly follow. That irritating hour one spends at large airports, as luggage arrives in dribs and drabs, doesn’t happen here.

We normally reach Val d’Isère by 4pm French time, just five hours from take-off, with the coach transfer on a Sunday only taking about 2 hours 45 minutes. Most of the transfer is on smooth and uncongested motorways and expressways. Ski schools and shops are uncrowded and open until at least 7.30pm.

Going home, our flight takes off at 1.30pm and lands just before 2pm UK time. The first of our staggered coaches leaves Val d’Isère at around 8.20am, the last an hour later, so nobody has to queue at check-in for more than a few minutes.

Because our charter flight will not have started, the price of holidays starting on 7 December includes all transport except the outbound flight. You can book low-cost scheduled flights, or, for a £25 per booking admin fee, we’ll book them for you. Just tell us where you wish to fly from. The same applies to the flight home on 26 April. The earlier you book, the cheaper flights are, and the less your holiday will cost. There will be YSE coach transfers from Geneva to Val d’Isère at noon and 5pm on 7 December, and from Val d’Isère to Geneva at 7am (for midday flights) and 9.30 (for 3pm flights) on 26 April.

Guests who tell us when booking that they are making their own way to Val d’Isère receive a £50 discount. This may not seem much, but having chartered our own aircraft and coaches to whisk you there faster than anything except a private jet and helicopter, we don’t want to encourage you to spurn them.

Anyway, the only people who want to drive are the proud owners of massive 4x4s keen to see if they are up to anything more macho than the school run. They always refuse to put their Tonka toy in the underground car-park (about £40 per week), then get stuck in the snow outside one of our chalets and have to be towed out by Larry, the YSE Land Rover.

Luggage on our flight is limited to 25kg, including hand baggage, plus a set of skis or a snowboard, and/or boots, so long as these are in separate bags not containing other items. People who bring excess baggage or who fill ski, board or boot bags with other items should know that they may be charged £6 per kg, or that their equipment might be refused. No single item of luggage may exceed 32kg. (These details do not necessarily apply to guests flying out on 7 December or home on 26 April.)

Our flights and coaches are non-smoking.

To ensure efficient handling of your luggage, please use our bright yellow labels marked with your name and chalet, and secure any loose straps.

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