Switzerland is home to some of our favourite resorts. For sheer charm and spectacular scenery, the ‘traffic-free’ villages of Wengen, Murren, Saas-Fee and Zermatt take some beating. Many resorts have impressive slopes too including some of the biggest, highest and toughest runs in the Alps, as well as a lot of reassuring intermediate terrain. For fast, efficient, queue-free lift networks, Swiss resorts rarely match French standards but the real black spots are gradually disappearing. And there are compensations: the world’s best mountain restaurants, for example. People always seem to associate Switzerland with high prices. Barring some catastrophic accident to the Swiss franc, prices are never going to be low, but usually they are not greatly different from prices in major French resorts; and what you get for your money is first-class.
Downhill skiing in its modern form was invented in Wengen and Murren, which were persuaded to open their summer railways in winter to take their British guests up the mountain. They remain firm favourites with their regular British visitors, who return every year to savour the special atmosphere of these tiny villages and their awesome views of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau.
While France is the home of the purpose-built resort, Switzerland is the home of the traditional mountain village that has transformed itself from farming community into year-round holiday centre. Many of Switzerland’s most famous mountain resorts are as popular in the summer as in the winter, or more so. This creates places with a much more lived-in feel to them and a much more stable local community. Many are still run and dominated by a handful of families who were lucky or shrewd enough to get involved in the early development of the area.
This has its downside as well as advantages. The ruling families are able to stifle competition and prevent newcomers from taking a slice of their action. New ski schools, competing with the traditional school and pushing up standards, are much less common than in other countries, for example. And in many resorts, British tour operators are severely restricted in the amount of guiding they can offer their guests a popular service which the schools see as taking business away from them. (Note, however, that the French are now even tougher on this than the Swiss.)
Of course, Switzerland is associated with high-living, and the swanky grand hotels of St Moritz, Gstaad, Zermatt and Davos are beyond the dreams of most British holidaymakers. And even in more modest resorts, nothing is cheap. But the quality of the service you get for your money is generally high. Swiss hotels are some of the best in the world. The trains run like clockwork to the advertised timetable (and often they run to the top of the mountain, doubling as ski-lifts). The food is almost universally of good quality, and much less stodgy than in neighbouring Austria. In Switzerland you get what you pay for: even the cheapest wine, for example, is not cheap; but it is reliable duff bottles are very rare.
Perhaps surprisingly for such a long-established, traditional, rather staid skiing country, Switzerland has gone out of its way to attract snowboarders by developing the facilities they look for. It is one of the most boarder-friendly of all Alpine nations.
Snowmaking, on the other hand, is something that most Swiss resorts have been very slow to provide partly because of environmental objections, it’s true. But if the Swiss want to keep or develop their international markets, reliable snow is essential and some Swiss resorts have been hard hit by snow shortages in recent years, so the pressure is accentuated there.
Posted in Switzerland Ski Resort
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