By Ed Ockelton
Independently owned and run ski chalets are not new. They have beenaround for many years. Over the last 5 years, however, there has beenan increase in relatively inexperienced people selling up in the UK ,and moving to the mountains to run catered ski chalet businesses.
When independent catered ski chalet operators first appeared on thescene, the owners and hosts tended to be passionate skiers who, afterliving for many years in a resort, had finally found a way to upgradetheir situations from "ski bums" to "legitimate business owners". Theyworked hard to develop their businesses built around their love of themountains, their knowledge of the local area and of course their skiingability.
Given that many of these original "ski chalet pioneers" had cuttheir teeth working in restaurants and hotels in ski resorts, cuisinewas also high on the agenda. Before long, the independent cateredchalet holiday became synonymous as a way of staying with hosts whoknew the mountains like the back of their hands, could show you thebest places to ski, and would serve up top class cuisine after a day onthe slopes.
Over recent years a dirge of reality TV programs in the UK havefocused on alpine businesses and made them look like attractivebusiness propositions. Under closer inspection, it isn't difficult tosee why such a business could look so attractive to an outsider.
Anyone can buy a large house and run a B&B somewhere in France.The trouble is it may be hard to quantify how many people visit thearea, what the future trends for visiting the area might be, and evenhow long a season might last. In a ski resort, to some extent you cantake away a lot of this uncertainty. The ski seasons are quite welldefined, and the ski industry is still a rapidly growing market.
Couple this with many equity-rich property owners in the UK and itbecomes obvious why there has been such a rush to jump on the bandwagonand move to the mountains.
All of this means that there are now a number of ski chalet ownersthat hide behind professional looking websites with no experience ofrunning such a business. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many, ifnot most of these new businesses thrive on hard work and enthusiasm andattract repeat customers year on year. But be warned. Just because acouple of accountants were good at their professions in the UK, andjust because they spent a million euros on a chalet, doesn'tnecessarily mean that they are the sort of people who know how to makea holiday work, or indeed the sort of people whose home you would wantto stay in for a week.
A week's catered chalet skiing holiday is not cheap, especially fora large family, and with so many apparently good, professional chaletbusinesses around, it can be difficult to know if you are choosing theright one. Two very important things to look for arerecommendations/word of mouth and independent chalet reviews.
Firstly, recommendations and word of mouth are both invaluable! If afriend who you trust recommends somewhere to you, then book it. Try andfind out where other people have been on holiday, and whether or notthey enjoyed it.
Secondly, try a website such as All Mountain Ski Holidays which has a ski chalet review section and see what others think of a place. Sites like All Mountain Holidays havemade it relatively easy for new chalet businesses to get up andrunning. However, the same medium should also be used to build thereputation of good quality chalets which deserve it.
If you stay somewhere, and you love it, let others know about it and encourage others to do the same for you!
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