Absolute Alps Holidays Ski Blog

I love the Portes du Soleil ski area and I think it’s one of the best in France if not the World! So I’ve put together a few statistics to show how the largest ski domains in France compare.

Total Kilometres of Ski Pistes

The Portes du Soleil clearly comes out on top with the 650 kms of pistes throughout the whole domain.

There has been some controversy recently over how the resorts come up with these figures, with German ski author and cartographer Christoph Schrahe claiming pretty much every area exaggerates their numbers.

It is funny how every resort seems to add up to a pretty round number !

The Portes du Soleil should get busy revising their figures to include the brand new piste built for the new Super-Chatel to Linga link.

6 Day Ski Pass Price

A large chunk of the cost a ski holiday is the cost of your lift pass for the week.

This graph shows the cost of a 6 day adult lift pass covering the whole area.

Portes du Soleil comes in second best in this category.

Remember to book your ski holiday with Absolute Alps and receive an extra 10% discount on the cost of the your ski passes.

 Ski Pass Costs per Kilometre

But what you really want to know is that you are getting value for money with your ski pass.

So yet again we have the Portes du Soleil coming in first place with its fantastic value for money ski pass which costs €0.37 per kilometre of piste.

Which is significantly cheaper than everyone else, with the next closest 27% more expensive and then soaring up to 167% more for the most expensive area located at Alpe D’Huez.

Total Number of Individual Pistes

Variety is supposedly the spice of life and we want lots of different pistes to choose from when we go skiing.

Storming to the top spot with the only area to break the 300 mark is Les Trois Vallees. 330 is a lot, if you skied 6 hours a day for 6 days you would need to average over 9 runs an hour to tick them all off! I think you would need more than 1 holiday to tick them all off.

But a very respectable second place goes to the Portes du Soleil, and as mentioned earlier we should be adding an extra one for the new lifts and piste currently being finished in Chatel.

Highest Ski Lift in Area

Any list of skiing statistics wouldn’t be complete without a mention of height of the ski area.

A good win for Espace Killy here, which towers in at 3550 metres.

But we all know that size isn’t everything, don’t we ?

Go too high and it’ll be too cold in the winter, too white on cloudy days with no trees to help navigate.

So although Portes du Soleil looks a little low on the graph with average snowfall of 8 metres and plenty of tree lined runs for the white out days I think it’s a perfect height!

Conclusion – Portes du Soleil is the BEST !

Well I think my carefully selected statistics, were Portes du Soleil comes top twice & second twice, clearly show that my home ski domain is the best in France. But really I think you should come and see for yourself, and while skiing in one of the best ski domains why not stay in one of the best chalets in France – Chalet Les Trois Canards.

Hope to see you soon

It’s been talked about for almost 20 years but work is finally under way to link up the Super-Chatel and Linga pistes. There will be two new chairlifts located at the top of the village just passed Lac Vonnes, one heading up to Super-Chatel and the other heading over to link up with the Linga pistes.

Super-Chatel to Lac Vonnes

As you can see from this image there will be a new 1500 meter blue piste coming from Super-Chatel down to Lac Vonnes which will be fitting with snow cannons.
The chairlift will be the 4-person high speed detachable type, and some of you may even have ridden this exact same chair before because it is coming from the Proclou in Avoriaz which is being upgraded to a 6-person lift this summer.

Lac Vonnes to Linga

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New Pointe de L’Au 4-person Chairlift

I’m most excited about the new Pointe de L’Au chairlift because the ancient, slow and very long 2-person chair it’s replacing was by far the worst lift in the whole of the PDS. It was a bottleneck between Champoussin and Les Crosets, which regularly managed to create massive snake like queues even when there wasn’t that many people around.
But the new high speed 4-person will make a massive difference for everyone exploring the great pistes on the Swiss side of the PDS, which are always a lot quieter than the main area between Avoriaz and Pres-la-Joux. The Swiss side has now had 4 new lifts in the last 4 years; 2 in Les Crosets, 1 in Morgins last year and now this one.
Along with the piste enhancements which happen along with the lifts the skiing on the Swiss side has really improved in the last few years, its’ infrastructure was poor in comparison to the French side but now it’s right up there and people should definitely spend some time exploring the area.

New Morzine Pleney Telecabin

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So we are past the half way mark now and well into the February school holidays, and it’s all good here in the snowy and cold ski resort of Chatel.

This season has produced great conditions pretty much every week, and for a period at the start of February I’d say conditions were as good as they ever get.

We started on high at the beginning of December with deep powder covering the mountain and resort, our first lucky clients staying the week before Christmas had a great time on very quiet and very snowy pistes.

A little bit of rain just before Christmas did flatten down the waist deep powder a little but the festival spirit was definitely not dampened down. It was a very busy Christmas and New Year in the resort with the holidays falling mid week again after a couple of slightly quieter year when they fell on the weekend, but with the great snow cover and massive expanse of the Portes du Soleil to discover lift queues are never too bad here.
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