Finding Your Perfect Ski Holiday

It never fails to give one a slight rush of excitement when you finally decide to take the plunge and enjoy a skiing holiday in winter.

Fortunately, the range of options available when planning a ski holiday is now greater than ever, genuinely allowing for flexibility. Perhaps you are thinking about a full-service chalet where someone else provides dinner for you, or an apartment that you self-cater so you can set your own pace. Maybe you want something quiet where you will have the mountains all to yourself. There is always a ski holiday for the type of traveller you are out there somewhere.

This guide is meant to assist you in making important choices. In this guide, we shall look into how to choose the resort that best meets your skiing needs, finding the right accommodation, building a trip piece by piece from transport, lift passes and more, all the while ensuring that each component is adequately protected.

Here are some of our favourite ski resorts in Austria and France that tend to remain less well known and therefore offer less crowded ski fields, cheaper accommodation, and a warm welcome despite their anonymity.

However, before booking anything, you should first understand your rights. Under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations, there is the statutory right to a refund or a suitable alternative holiday in case of failure in a package holiday provided by any UK operator. ATOL covers your flight if it forms part of the package holiday. It’s always worth checking your operator is ATOL-protected (you can search the register on the CAA’s ATOL site) and looking for the ABTA logo too; ABTA membership brings its own financial protection and a code of conduct operators have to stick to. Both schemes exist for exactly this reason: so your money, and your holiday, are safe.

Ready to get into it? Here’s where to start:

• Choosing the Perfect Ski Resort – snow reliability, altitude and how to narrow down where to go
• Finding Your Ideal Ski Accommodation – chalet, hotel or apartment, and how to choose
• How to Design Your Perfect Package Ski Holiday – building your own package, step by step
• The Best Hidden Gem Resorts in Austria – quieter Austrian resorts worth your time
• The Best Hidden Gem Resorts in France – lesser-known French resorts with big-name skiing

And if you’re still deciding between destinations altogether, our Best Ski Resorts in Europe and Best Snow-Sure Ski Resorts guides are a good place to widen the search.