Skiing In France

Summer is over and the winter season is rapidly approaching. This means many of us will be getting excited at the prospect of carving down pistes, cruising through off piste powder snow and washing a hard days skiing or snowboarding down with several biers and some pommes frites. However, even if you have all your own equipment and are beyond needing lessons, winter sport holidays are still an expensive habit to satisfy.

Last season, many traditional winter sport companies felt the pinch of the credit crunch. Although the snow conditions were fantastic, people were either booking late or not booking at all. The big resorts of Austria, France and Switzerland all suffered as people were looking outside the Euro zone to Bulgaria and Slovenia for a cheaper alternative.

This year is likely to be the same. But if you are a real snow-addict and need at least one fix a year of mountains, fresh air and fun on the slopes there could be a way to save money but still go to some of the best and most snow-sure resorts in the French Alps. Cue the idea of ski weekends.

This isn’t actually a new idea, it is just one that is growing in popularity. Several companies offer this alternative but then tend to offer a rather limited choice of resorts, dates and accommodation. Plus they are not that much cheaper than going for a week.

However, igoski.co.uk has focused its ski weekends on a specific region of France and thanks to this it can widen its accommodation choices, dates and prices, plus you go by plane not by car. They even have an appropriately named ‘ski weekends’ section on their website. They dynamically package the deal for you, i.e. they don’t use charter flights and set accommodation, so it’s like booking all the component parts yourself, but they do it for you.

They only offer a choice of four ski resorts, whereas other companies offer either just one, which you have probably never heard of, or tonnes of resorts but you probably still have never heard of them. Getting the resort right for your needs is the most important part of a ski and boarding holiday. Go high and look for glaciers to guarantee snow; look at the percentage of blue (easy), red (intermediate) and black (hard) pistes and if you are an off-piste junkie investigate their backcountry opportunities. Ifyouski.co.uk only offers Chamonix, Les Gets, Morzine and Meribel however, most skiers now that these are some of the best and most snow-sure resorts in Europe. So you can go full throttle for three and a half days and you’ll hardly even need any time off work.