 Poster: A snowHead
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Spent last week in Sestriere with a large group. A few observations that might be useful.
The skiing
Generally a very pleasant surprise. Lots of great fun long rolling pistes, especially over the hill in Sauze and down to Sansicario. Nothing terribly challenging - blacks would be red in other resorts. Montgenèvre in France was also nice, if a bit of a trek to get to. Much of the skiing is amongst trees.
Lifts are a little antiquated, especially the link back from Sauze and the link over to Claviere, which are slow 2 man chairs. This did not matter much as the resort was almost empty, but could be a problem if busy. Longest queue was about 2 mins all week.
Mountain restaurants generally quite good and very cheap. Special mention for Cicci’s House down towards Sauze and also the one numbered 5 on the piste map (I forget its name) on left side of map which does excellent pizzas and has great staff. Both great value.
Snow conditions were excellent, with a decent snowfall on Friday which gave us some fun in powder on Saturday in the huge areas of accessible off-piste between the pistes. Weather forecast was thankfully wrong all week, and we had 5 days of sun and one day of snow and whiteout.
Sestriere is not a village of great beauty, but was less ugly than expected - certainly better than Les Menuires.
The hotel and package etc
We booked through Crystal, who were generally efficient and helpful in organising a large group, apart from screwing up room allocations which we had to sort out on arrival.
We stayed in Hotel du Col. Great location, virtually ski in ski out. Rooms large, comfortable and clean with good showers. Great staff who went extra mile. Good bar in the basement with live music twice during the week (and a rather spectacular barmaid...). Food is a buffet - good antipasti to start, mains rather hit and miss. Free wine just about drinkable....
Flights with TUI LGW to Turin all on time. Turin a bit of a scrum on arrival, better on departure. Short transfer (1.5 hours).
Ski hire booked through Sestriereonline, cheaper than Crystal, but used same shop - Maison Clataud. Convenient location next to hotel, but poorly prepared kit (had to change skis twice on first day, and several others also needed to change), and incredibly rude and unpleasant when we did this. DIN settings seemed to be completely random. Would avoid.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the area. We had a great week, and will likely return.
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