Fed up with the high prices and inflexible schedules of ski holidays? Take the DIY option – it's easier than it sounds and costs much less, writes EMMA CULLINAN
LAST WEEK I was up an Austrian Alp staying at a cattle farm, where Maria lives with her husband and four kids, amid stunning mountain views. The 150 cows lived next door to the chalet we were sleeping in, where they were cosying up and eating silage during the snow-laden winter. In the summer, Maria explained, the cattle would be taken up to the alm – or meadow – on the Kitzbühel slopes for grazing, but for now it was I and the man in my life who would drive to Kitzbühel each morning – to ski.
I found the farm on the internet as part of a home-made ski package, and it cost us €44 a night for two – with breakfast. I long ago gave up package ski holidays because they are expensive and you have to stay for a week or two. The way many people’s lives are, it’s necessary to do things more cheaply and to squeeze in days between work commitments, whether that is in a full-time job where long holidays are difficult to book or because you work part-time.
Because of work issues, and not wanting to leave our teens at home alone for days on end (they prefer socialising to skiing), we have become weekend skiers – heading for the Alps twice a year for a few days at a stretch. Ideally, and our European brethren can do this, you would take a flight (or drive) late on Friday or early on Saturday morning and be on the slopes by 10am and then ski your last run on a Sunday afternoon and fly straight home. Irish flight times rarely allow for this (most make weekend skiers fly out around midday on Friday and back on Monday).
The winner on honing the days (down to three) is the Aer Lingus flight to Munich which flies back to Dublin at 7.30pm on Sunday, so you can leave the slopes in one of the resorts in or around Kitzbühel (including Irish favourite Westendorf) at about 4pm, drive the two hours to the airport and whizz home (the Dublin to Munich flight leaves at 3.30pm on Friday or first thing Saturday, at 6.40am). Also, the Aer Lingus flight from Cork to Munich at 6.30am and arriving at 9.30am on a Friday could feasibly have you skiing in the afternoon.
But for most Irish skiers, weekend skiing means four days: ambling out of the country on a Friday and coming back on a Monday. Once you are in this mindset you do become quite free as to where you can ski because you will have hours to drive along Alpine valleys.
I would like to advocate public transport, and the Swiss railway system in particular is wonderful. You can also get buses and taxis from airports to the resorts all over the Alps, but I’m afraid – on a short break like this – I think hiring a car is essential. That is because, with time so short, you need to be flexible about when you leave airports and resorts.
Also, if you have a car you can go anywhere, which means that you can book the flight long before you find accommodation and then, when you actually go, you can drive to where there is snow (this is very important later in the season when the lower resorts can get slushy).
Many resorts cater for package companies, so certain hotels are reluctant to take bookings just for a weekend because they will be holding out for a week. Some will take a provisional booking and then ask you to wait until nearer the time to see if it is still free. But there is still plenty to choose from, especially in less packagey resorts, which locals go to.
Your first stop is the tourist office, which supplies lists of accommodation, with prices ranging from €300 a night for the multi-star spa hotels to the €20 each guest houses (self-catering is difficult to get for a weekend). One thing about weekend skiing is that you can ski hard all day knowing that you don’t have to pace your energy over a whole week, and you will have plenty of time to recover. For that reason I’m happy not to have a whole smart-hotel-with-pool experience afterwards. I just want to wind down in basic, clean accommodation.
Our farm holiday happened after we inadvertently booked the half-term weekend at the last minute. All hotels in all resorts were full, unless you were prepared to pay €300 a night for a double room, but eventually I found a little-known guesthouse website (hohe-salve.com) and discovered Maria who, despite having a guesthouse called Wifiberg, had no e-mail address. As with the trusty olden days, I just gave her my name over the phone and turned up the following night. Having a car meant we could drive the few kilometres out of the village of Hopfgarten each night and then drive to ski in the morning.
Previous weekends have seen us stay in a BB just outside Klosters with a (free) ski bus stop outside it (€55 for a double with BB); a guesthouse with a sauna at the base of the Nasserein lift in St Anton (€80 for a double with BB), and I went with my brother and sister to a big, baggy old hotel (Le Dahu, hotel-le-dahu.com, at €55 a triple room), which is a 10- minute walk from the main ski lift at Argentière (one of the Chamonix resorts).
Once you have a car then you can even stay in a back-of-beyond village up to half an hour from the resort, should getting accommodation closer in prove to be a nightmare.
Some resorts (such as Crans Montana) charge you to park near the ski lifts while others (Kirchberg, beside Kitzbühel) have free parking, so check that out before your go. In car-free resorts (for instance, Saas-Fee and Flaine) you leave your car in an edge-of-town car park (for a reasonable fee).
Saturdays are package-holiday changeover days, when people are coming and going from the resort and not skiing, so you will be sharing the mountain with local weekend skiers, and most resorts are none too crowded. On Sunday, more locals and new holidaymakers hit the slopes.
Resorts where there is just one main lift up to the pistes can prove a nightmare, with around half an hour of sliding and squashing against other people’s padded snow gear as you edge towards the ride up the mountain. Klosters was the worst for this. In popular resorts such as St Anton, the lifts can get crowded, but there is more than one and if you head for the lift further out of the town centre life gets easier. A drive up to the Pengelstein One lift a couple of kilometres out of Kirchberg, for instance, will have you up on the mountain in no time, even on peak dates.
Later in the season package holidays stop altogether and so resorts quieten down. One year we were heading back from St Anton with a plan to spend a day in Munich when a surprise snowstorm hit and the usually crowded Westendorf, which is so low that tour operators stop bringing people there in early March, was covered in fresh powder snow, and we shared the whole resort with about seven other people. Driving gives you that flexibility.
It’s not worth bringing your own skis for the weekend because high baggage charges make it just as cheap to hire them, at about €14 a day. Over a week bringing your own can be cheaper. To keep costs down, I hire a small car and pack a bike rack to put the skis on.
I pack my ski boots in my carry-on luggage, padding in the ski gear and a few long-sleeved tops in around it, but himself draws the line at this and hires boots.Then you can head for a weekend in another zone, give your body a shake out and feel the wind through your hair before bumping back to reality a few days later.
Where to go and what to pay
Geneva airport is one hour away from Megève, Flaine and Chamonix resorts, while Salzburg airport is one hour from Schladming resort and one and a half hours from Saalbach Hinterglemm.
Flight prices vary massively and some of the airports that Aer Lingus flies to are also business destinations (Geneva, Munich and Zurich), so fares can reach scary peaks. A realistic flight price to the Alps should be around €100 return. Car hire will be between €100 and €150 for four days. A ski pass will be about €30-€40 a day, boots €10 a day and skis €14 a day.
Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) flies from Dublin to Geneva, Zurich, Munich, Salzburg, Milan (Linate), and from Cork to Geneva and Munich.
Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from Dublin to Memmingham (Munich West, an hour’s drive from Munich), Milan (Bergamo), Salzburg, Marseille and Turin.
EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies from Belfast to Geneva.