Here’s a silly question, to which the only sensible answer is “a lot”. How much should I expect to spend on a skiing holiday?
For there’s no getting away from it: skiing is an expensive business. There’s flights and accommodation, then equipment hire, lift passes, lessons maybe, lunch on the mountain (where prices seem to rise with the altitude) and even the extra premium that travel insurance companies slap on for winter-sports coverage.
Very little of this is negotiable, especially if you’re a family hoping to hit the slopes during the school holidays, Christmas, the February half-term or Easter, when skiing costs are at their peak.
As a family, we’ve tried all sorts of ways of slicing and dicing this. Self-catering versus hotels or a catered chalet. All-in packages, with flights and transfers included, versus low-cost airlines and a hire car. Half-board versus a supermarket shop. We’ve even skied specifically in resorts that offer family lift-pass packages at a (slight) discount. But the answer to the first question is still the same: a lot.
The other thing about skiing is that spending more money doesn’t necessarily come with any guarantees of getting on the slopes. The start of this season provided a particularly salutary lesson, with many resorts in France, parts of Switzerland and Austria hit by a lethal combination of unusually warm weather and a lack of early snowfall. Those heading out for a white Christmas in the Alps entered Bing Crosby’s universe: they were dreaming of it.
Which brings us to Val-d’Isère last month, and a visit to Scott Dunn’s new Chalet Husky. Scott Dunn occupies the higher slopes of the ski-holiday market, mostly though upmarket catered chalets, but also offering hotels and self-catered apartments. Is the expense worth it, when the same money would guarantee five-star luxury and a tan from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean?
The United Kingdom-based company is making a big push for the Gulf market this year, believing there’s a growing demand for luxury ski holidays in the region, especially among wealthier expats. It’s automatically converting prices into dirhams on its website and getting its sales staff to rise several hours earlier to allow for the time difference between the UK and UAE.
Scott Dunn is also taking advantage of Emirates’ daytime non-stop service to Geneva, with flight times that match particularly well with resort transfers (Etihad also flies direct to Geneva from Abu Dhabi, but the return leg is overnight).
The company currently operates 15 chalets in Val-d’Isère, in the French Tarentaise Alps, but seems to have identified Chalet Husky, one of the latest in a string of blingy chalets in the entire Alps, as one with particular Gulf appeal.
The decor at Husky shouts “ready to party”. In the living room, a log fire competes with a giant TV screen; it’s accessed by a glass walkway over an atrium filled with tropical plants. All of the seven bedrooms are large, by Alpine standards, and en suite. Downstairs is a swimming pool, with a waterfall and disco lighting in the ceiling, and a sauna, hot tub and steam room. There’s even a small climbing wall and an archery range, the latter with arrows sensibly fitted with rubber sucker tips, given the party atmosphere.
Chalet Husky comes with numerous attentive staff and a chef to prepare pretty much anything you want to eat for dinner and breakfast. Complimentary drinks and a minibus transfer to the resort and daily to and from the slopes are also included. The ski-rental company even comes to you to fit your boots and deliver the skis.
Chalet Husky also comes at a price. The deal is single occupancy, which means one group must take the whole chalet. In the peak periods, a week can cost up to Dh32,000 per person, not including flights from the UAE. For a group of 14, that works out at Dh448,000 before you’ve ventured down even so much as a nursery slope. There’s clearly that kind of money around to be spent, though. At the time of writing, only three weeks were still open for booking for the current season.
Off-peak, from mid- to late-January, Husky drops to Dh7,390 per head, per week. Scott Dunn has less-expensive options. Chalet Marie, which oozes Alpine charm, starts from Dh6,250. A self-catered four-bedroom apartment, ideal for a family break, with breakfast and cleaning, a fridge full of food and full access to Scott Dunn resort services, starts from Dh5,360 per person, per week.
Those sort of prices dramatically close the gap between other, seemingly budget options. Having a luxurious end to a hard day’s downhill is only part of the Alpine skiing experience, which this year has started with some genuine worries about the future of the industry.
The crashing Russian rouble and economic sanctions against Moscow over its behaviour in Ukraine mean that high-spending Russian visitors are expected to be in short supply this year, with the pain being felt most in glamorous resorts like Courchevel 1850, with its designer brands and heated pavements.
The early snow worries in the Alps this season have been well recorded, with several resorts, from La Plagne to St Anton and Chamonix to Verbier forced to delay opening or operating with only a handful of runs, although recent heavy snow has improved the picture. In Val-d’Isère, two long-time residents quietly told me that this was the least snow they had seen in December in more than 30 years.
Yet while the slopes down to the resort remained more brown than white, and the town had barely a dusting of snow to bring out the seasonal charm, two weeks before Christmas, there was still plenty of skiing to be had.
Val-d’Isère forms half of the massive Espace Killy, which includes Tignes. Its upper slopes rise to 3,456 metres – more than four times the height of the Burj Khalifa, in case you were wondering – with much of the skiing at altitudes above 2,500 metres.
At that height, any snow that falls is going to stick around. More significantly, the temperatures are cold enough for the snow cannons to lay down significant depth. Val-d’Isère has invested heavily in snow making, supposedly with the capability to cover an area the size of a football pitch with half a metre every hour.
Emerging at the top of the Solaise Express chairlift, we’re greeted with a vast snowfield stretching in every direction. From here, it’s another couple of short lifts up to the connection to Le Fornet, with a long, cruising blue run to the bottom of the Vallon bubble and then access to the super-high reds and blues on the Pissaillas glacier.
The next morning, some sterling work by the snow makers sees the Olympique cable car open for the first time this season, with a wide range of runs long enough and steep enough to satisfy all but the most hard-core black-run devotee. There’s even enough fresh snow up to the edge of the pistes to divert for a couple of experimental powder turns.
The sun is shining; the snow soft and forgiving. Lunch beckons at any one of a number of mountain restaurants, from the raucous La Folie Douce, with its afternoon cabaret in the snow, to the gourmet delights of La Fruitière and Tête de Solaise.
How do you put a price on that experience? Especially when the only thing you really have much control over is, hopefully, your carving turns. Skiing is expensive and sometimes the only thing to do is accept that the odd dirham or two isn’t going to change that.
So here’s another silly question, to which the only sensible answer is also “a lot”. Forgetting the cost, how much fun can you have on a skiing holiday?
jlangton@thenational.ae
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