What we booked for our skiing holiday
My husband and I recently went on our first skiing holiday. We went 20th to 26th January, which is before the peak season. As a newbie, it felt pretty busy to me, but apparently it gets A LOT busier, especially in February half term.
The general advice for your first skiing holiday is to book a package so you don’t miss anything. We didn’t do that! This is what we did book…
We flew on EasyJet from Birmingham to Geneva. For us, in Gloucestershire, flying from Birmingham rather than Heathrow was significantly easier.
We had transfers to and from Geneva airport to Morzine in the French Alps with AlpyBus. AlpyBus specialises in Geneva airport transfers, which are in a shared minibus. They drive you straight to your hotel, but you may have to stop at other nearby hotels on the way. Our transfer was in rush hour and took nearly two hours – a lot longer than expected. The return journey, on a Sunday morning, only took an hour and 15 minutes.
We stayed at Les Mazots des Fées hotel on the outskirts of Morzine (in the wrong direction for Avoriaz where we were skiing, but it wasn’t a problem). The hotel is a small, beautiful boutique hotel which looks like a cluster of Alpine chalets, both inside and out. I absolutely loved it! Our room was very spacious and it felt more like an Airbnb than a hotel, especially as our room was right inside the front door, so we didn’t even have to pass reception to get to it.
We didn’t book breakfast initially, but ended up having it at the hotel every day for ease. Being such a small hotel, the breakfast was quite limited, but the bread and croissants were delicious and very fresh. On arrival, we were told they didn’t service the room every day, which is fine. Servicing rooms often seems like overkill. However they didn’t replenish either the shampoo and shower gel or the coffee until we asked on our fifth day. They all needed replacing as we stayed for six nights! They also cleaned the room and replaced the towels then, which was nice.
We hired skis, ski boots, helmets and poles from Caribou in Morzine. We booked it all online – we had to give our height, weight, shoe size and head circumference. They dropped it all off at our hotel on the evening we arrived, ready for us to ski the following morning. Although my boots were actually a size small, but it was no problem to go into the shop to swap them and get my skis adjusted. We still made it to the top of the mountain in time for our lesson! At the end of the week, we just dropped them back at the shop, which was open until 7pm, meaning it was possible to get a full day’s skiing.
We booked a Portes du Soleil lift pass, which gave us access to Avoriaz and a wide range of ski resorts in the area in both France and Switzerland. It is more expensive than the Morzine Les Gets pass, but gives you access to more slopes and higher slopes, meaning more snow! When we went on holiday, the small amount of snow in Morzine all melted over the course of the week.
There are absolutely loads of ski schools to choose from, for both private and group lessons. We had private ski lessons with Freedom 2 Ski – a small British-run ski school, which had excellent reviews. Private lessons mean you should make quicker progress and won’t be held back by others in your group. Or, in my case, I wouldn’t hold back the others in my group! We were very happy with our instructor, Luc, who has been teaching skiing for 34 years. We will definitely book lessons with him again if we go skiing in the future.
We were very happy with all our choices for our first skiing holiday. When and if we go skiing again, we will do most of it the same.