The thing about holidays is that they’re supposed to be, well, a holiday. For most people that means a relaxing, stress-free time as you escape the hassles of your daily life and get to chill out a little bit.
Sadly, with ski holidays in particular, the reverse can be true. There’s no arguing that ski holidays take a lot of organising, before you go and sometimes in resort too. On top of all the usual holiday requirements, there are lift passes to book and collect, ski lessons and, if you have young children, kindergarten care to check out and organise. And then there’s the kit.
You need all that extra clothing to keep warm and safe on the slopes, and you may have your own ski gear to take too, to prevent any problems in resort queuing at the rental shop and finding the right equipment for you.
By the time you finally stand at the top of the slopes for your first run of your ski week, you’ll hopefully be feeling it was all worth it, but you may feel you’ve fought a bit of a battle to get there.
Thankfully, these days there are ways and means to make your ski holiday less stressful to get on. You can book and reserve many of the services you need online and have things like lift passes waiting for you in your accommodation when you arrive.
A growing number of specialist baggage transfer companies enable smart skiers to travel light and have all that luggage collected from home before they go and delivered to their accommodation so that it is waiting for them on arrival.
They’ll ship your ski gear pretty much anywhere worldwide with a simple online booking process and an app to track progress of your bags. They’ll email you the paperwork to print and send you tough plastic luggage pouches in the mail to pop on your luggage. Then they’ll collect it and deliver it to your resort accommodation ahead of you.
In one move you no longer need to work out how to make the miserly weight allowance and then cram everything into the car; instead you can skip that long queue at check-in and that extra trip/queue with your skis/board to the “outsized baggage” desk, and be first on the transfer coach at the other end (maybe even grab an espresso whilst everyone else is waiting at the luggage carousel). You won’t even risk putting your back out lugging it all on and off cars, planes, luggage trolleys, buses and maybe over the snow at the end. Genius! The good thing is that it can even cost about the same as some airlines charge as baggage supplements anyway.
