JQ Louise is a food and travel writer based in Boston. She has written for Teen Vogue, Style Me Pretty, Paste Magazine and several other publications. You can also occasionally find her on the Food Network Snapchat! She loves to share her travel tips and tricks on her blog jqlouise.com and her Instagram account @jqlouise. Catch her first book “Boston Food Crawls.”
Winter can be a drag, but if you lean into the season and embrace the cold weather, you’ll realize that it’s not that bad of a season at all. And trust me, heading to the Alps to ski will definitely help! Here are a few tips before you take your first official “Alpine Ski Trip.”
1. Figure out where exactly you want to go.
When we say the “Alps,” we are actually talking about quite a large part of central Europe. The Alps cover parts of France, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, and Slovenia.
For my first trip, I decided to go to the center of it all—St. Moritz, the self-proclaimed birthplace of winter tourism. Twice home to the Winter Olympics, St. Moritz certainly has the skiing pedigree to please even the most expert skier, but also plenty of wide-open runs for the rest of us.
2. Decide how you are getting there.
Unlike other trips to Europe, the Alps require a bit more planning when it comes to travel. Not because it’s difficult to get to, but because there are quite a few options to choose from. To get to St. Moritz from Boston, we chose to fly on British Airways through Heathrow to Milan. From Milan, we rented a car and drove two-and-a-half hours to the mountains.
A few pro tips: you will definitely want to choose a full-service airline to get to Europe and, if you can swing it, business class is a worthy upgrade. First off, you will be checking a bag (or two!), and think about it, all of your ski clothes and gear take up a lot of space. You will want to bring plenty of cute sweaters for après, so you will need the checked baggage allowance included. And second, this is going to be an active vacation, so you will want to cross the Atlantic in a restful and relaxing manner. A lie-flat bed before several days of barreling down 10,000 feet of elevation was something I decided I could save up for and splurge on. Think about splurging on business class with British Airways and you won’t be disappointed.
3. Get acquainted with the “Piste Map.”
Unlike in the U.S., Europe is a bit more relaxed when it comes to trail markers, so be sure to grab a paper trail map (or ‘Piste Map’ as they call it in the Alps) from your hotel before you hit the slopes. Plan out your runs based on your ability and get familiar with the mountain. Remember, in Europe, they have an additional trail category, red. The order goes: Green (absolute beginner), Blue (beginner/intermediate), Red (advanced), Black (Expert). Basically, if you are an average skier, you should be fine through red. Black trails are more like double black diamonds in the U.S., so watch out.
4. Weigh the aprés options.
We have all heard great things about the après scene in Europe (après is essentially relaxing socialization after a particularly demanding activity), so you will definitely want to check it out once over there. In St. Moritz, there were plenty of different options.
On the mountain, there were several slope side bars where you could sit outside with a hot or cold beverage and enjoy the sunshine. And once we got back into town, there were lots of other cozy ways to enjoy the afternoon as well. In fact, at our hotel, Badrutt’s Palace, we had the most amazing afternoon tea. Sitting in the grand lobby, overlooking the lake, a glass of champagne, some hot tea and some delightful finger sandwiches and sweets was just the way to unwind after a day of skiing!
5. Plan on eating lots of cheese.
If you go to Switzerland to ski, the one thing you can count on besides amazing skiing is that there will be lots of cheese. We had cheese plates on the mountain, we had molten raclette at dinner, we had fondue—I could go on. It was just a cheese lover’s dream. So, if you needed yet another reason to head to St. Moritz this year, let it be the abundance of cheese!