Today’s Photo
Every weekday during winter, and occasionally the rest of the year
20 July 2024
Have you ever stayed in the sweet old Hôtel Le Parc on Val d’Isère’s main street? Planning to return (in spite of its being graded 41st best of Val’s 42 hotels on Tripadvisor)?
Sorry – you’re a bit late! Here’s how it looks now:
And here’s how it is going to look for winter 25-26:
The architect’s view may be a tad optimistic – those trees would be in the middle of the road, and if you look carefully there seem to be one fellow levitating above a pile of snow and another wearing a bow tie on his balcony – not very Val d’Isère! But the twelve apartments are going to be seriously smart. They’ll need to be: they’re available to buy off-plan at 50,000€ the m2. Say £4,000 per square foot!
Property in Val d’Isère is now really expensive, but the prices of everything else haven’t caught up yet. The lift pass costs about a third as much as in Vail or Aspen and gives access to between five times (Vail) and thirty-five times (Aspen) the ski area!
The hotels are mostly eye-wateringly costly, but that’s why you stay with YSE (for our prices click here). And don’t forget that we charge by the whole chalet now, not by the person. Somebody thought that £10,800 made us almost as expensive as some of our more rapacious competitors, until we pointed out that it was for ten guests…
Val d’Isère has several superb restaurants where you’ll need your platinum card (La Table de l’Ours, L’Altiplano, Matsuhisa, Loulou etc), but you can still eat well for a fraction of the cost at places too numerous to list. Val has always appealed to sporty people, more motivated by skiing or snowboarding than by eating.
Lessons are never cheap, but by comparing prices one can find some good deals (here – some of the rates are from last season, since most of the instructors have been teaching on the glacier, working as builders or recovering on a beach somewhere and haven’t thought about next season yet). We are big believers in private lessons: paying 150€ each per morning with just one friend or partner is so much more enjoyable and better for your skiing than paying half that to share with up to nine strangers and learn very little!
Ski hire – the same applies: we’re awaiting next season’s prices, but they won’t have moved much from last season (here). There are some surprisingly reasonable rates, particularly if you book online for those shops where you can, or wait until you get here for those where you can’t (i.e. run by older people, contemporaries of our photographer, who still calls 2p tuppence…).
Anyway, we’re forecast a La Niña winter, with lots of snow, so things are looking good, unless you planned to book Le Parc…
