 Poster: A snowHead
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Hi All
Just back from La Chinaillon and had a great time... total cost for 1 weeks skiing 1-8th March including absolutely everything was about £1650 for 4 of us!
Thought for those looking for bargains I'd tell you how we did it!
We booked our flights to Geneva with Easyjet about 4 weeks before we went - £205 return for 4.. really unsocial times though... had to leave home at 4am to get the 8am flight out, and had to leave the apartment at 3am to get the 7am flight back. Car parking at Birmingham was only £12 for the week using a Purple Parking discount code and Quidco.
We arrived at Geneva and spent nearly 2 hours (yes, you heard it right!) queueing for a hire car from Alamo. Luckily for us 2 of the people in the queue in front of us had booked cars from the French side and so were quickly dispatched otherwise we would have taken even longer. The hire car was only £150 for a Megane as we used Quidco and the Virgin discount code and we saved £20 on excess insurance by using a 3rd party insurer (just as well, because I managed to scratch the car in the underground carpark so I now need to wait to see how much of the excess we will be charged).
We took sarnies for lunch and stopped en route to the resort to eat them - just as well, it was Sunday and nothing seemed to be open anywhere.
After arriving at our apartment in Les Outalays (which was fab and cost us £600 for the week) we drove into Chinaillon to pick up our prebooked skis, boots etc - the Sport 2000 shop was friendly and efficient. We only paid for the adult kit as kids under 10 go free with Snowell so that was another bargain - £134 for 4 sets of skis&poles, 3 pairs of boots and 2 helmets.
We popped into the local Spar and bought bread, milk, butter, ham and cheese so that we would have lunch the next day - we took enough Weetabix for day one. Decided we definitely didn't want to shop there all week - 4 slices of ham was £4.50 and 250g of cheese cost nearly a fiver!
First days skiing - after an unhurried breakfast, we got to the lift pass office and discovered that a local family pass was available - 2 adults and 2 kids was only £380 - decided against the area pass as the snow was great and we didn't think we would want to be bothered driving to La Clusaz anyway. Had a nightmare first morning with the kids falling over and no visibility - so we came back to the apartment for lunch. Nice to be 'ski in/out'. After a re-heat and sandwiches we headed back out to ski - much more refreshed than if we had stopped at a restaurant. We came home at about 4.30 and popped a cake in the oven (courtesy of a Tesco packet mix). After cake and hot chocolate we headed down to the Champion in Thones to do a weeks shopping. For £100 I got a full weeks shopping - 6 evening meals, 6 lunches and a selection of breakfast cereal.
I had a plan of what we would eat before we went - this really helped with the shopping as I had a list, and I had packed some of the essentials already- the kids are used to particular sauces etc, so I knew it would be easier to have some familiar things - I took things like Schwartz packet mixes, wraps, noodles, pasta in sauce.
The plan was:
Sunday night - Pasta - Sauce in a pouch and pasta I had with me (in case the shops weren't open)
Monday - Pizza (something quick as we knew we would be late back from the supermarket)
Tuesday - Chicken Fajitas
Wednesday - Sausage and Mash with veg
Thursday - Sweet and Sour Pork
Friday - Steak, salad and chips
Saturday - Meatballs and spaghetti
Not exactly haute cuisine, but healthy, filling, and easy to cook. Lots of veg every night (which is something I find you don't get enough of in French restaurants) and fruit for snacks. We had pudding most days - Creme Brulee, Chocolate baked bananas, Crepes, and 'Angel Delight' LOL!
We had taken a whole load of mini chocolate bars with us as I knew from past holidays chocolate on the mountain costs a fortune. We took a picnic or came back to the apartment for lunch. On the days we took a picnic we had the picnic early and stopped for drinks and chips mid-afternoon - cost for 2 cokes, a coffee and a punnet of chips was about £8. The set lunch menus for 4 of us would have averaged around £50 including drinks - so this is where we really saved a lot of money.
In the evenings the kids watched a DVD and then we had a bottle of wine and watched telly or read. It was a very quiet holiday - but tbh with the kids we wouldn't have really had much choice.
I know a lot of people would think its not a holiday doing all the cooking just to save money, but I don't mind self-catering - I find it a lot less stressful to feed the kids things I know they will eat rather than wait for restaurants to open and scour menus to find something that isn't just nugget and chips for them. Choosing an apartment with a dishwasher, microwave and fridge/freezer helps.
We don't feel like we skimped on anything we would have had on a chalet holiday (which is how we used to go pre-children) - we had a good breakfast, nice lunches, chocolate snacks on the slopes, cake or scones when we got back and 2 course dinners with wine and beer.
The return flight times were really anti-social - we had to get up at 3am. I packed some rolls for breakfast, which we ate at the airport before getting on the plane. We arrived back at our house at 10am. The kids went out to play, but I crashed.
We took the kids out to dinner that night to save shopping or cooking and to 'end' the holiday. The whole family was in bed by 8.30pm!
I think that is the only thing I would do differently, and that I felt we skimped on - I would have preferred a later flight back - because it threw us out of kilter for the whole of Sunday - the difference in price was about £160 and given how much we saved elsewhere it might have been worth it to get a full nights sleep before travelling home.
Anyway, hope this has been useful. I'll review the actual skiing soon - but we have proved it is possible to ski on a budget - mine was £2K and I have easily achieved it and some spare, even with the current rubbish exchange rate!
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Brilliant,
Well done on making a ski holiday very affordable
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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skimom, Impressive! Just shows how much can be saved with a little organisation! 
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Interesting; sounds a bit like hard work, though. Cooking more than once or twice on holiday would be desperation city for us. Presumably driving would have upped the cost (train certainly would).
What sort of area is La Chinaillon? I've never heard of it, I'm ashamed to admit.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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richmond, the hard work bits were the getting up early for the flights, and the queue for the car hire at Geneva.
We go camping for 3 weeks in the summer hols where I also cater most days, so I have a 'repertoire' of easy to cater meals. I really don't find that too much trouble and I am used to French supermarket brands etc. now so the shopping is a lot easier than it used to be. I find going to overpriced restaurants much more stressful because I am a skinflint. I can't relax and enjoy the food if the kids are tired, fidgeting, are living on a diet of 'fast food' or if I want yet another Diet Coke but resent paying £3.50 for it.
When we are camping the hassle is the shopping because I have to go every 2 or 3 days as we have no way of storing fresh meat, or cooking bread so we have to get this daily. This apartment had a huge fridge - I bought an entire weeks milk, meat (half of which went in the freezer), salad, yoghurts etc. and as it had a proper oven we could use the pre-cooked bread - so I could do it all in one big trip.
Each to their own though - I know for some people eating out is a luxury - for me its sometimes an ordeal! By choice I would go to a catered chalet - so I tried to replicate that as far as possible. I am lucky that my DH will do all the washing up, loading and unloading the dishwasher etc. so its not like I have to do everything.
You could get a bit of cabin fever not going out I suppose, but we ski all day so we like to be out the door by 9am and by the time we get in at 4.30/5ish the kids have had enough, DH gets them bathed and in PJs while I cook. If we went out to dinner (which we did once in Samoens last year) the restaurants didn't open till 7, so we had to get them changed from skiing, bathed, into 'going out clothes', wait for the restuarant to open, wait after we ordered. We didn't get back to the apartment till about 9pm - yet it felt hurried, we still had to get them into PJs and they weren't exactly 'up for it' at 8am the next morning. This year, knowing that we had no intention of eating out, we only took them one change of clothes, so we also cut down on our luggage! (used the weight allowance for food LOL!)
La Chinaillon is part of Le Grand Bonand. Its a smallish resort (IMO) with 90KM of mainly blue/red pistes - and you can buy an Aravis pass that includes La Clusaz and some other smaller resorts if you want 220KM of piste (but you have to bus/car between them as they aren't linked so we didn't bother).
Driving would have been about the same price as the plane+car hire, but would have taken a lot longer - we were door to door UK time coming back from 2am - 10am so about 8hrs. I think the drive from Calais to the Aravis is about 9hrs and we are 3.5hrs to Calais and another hour on the tunnel. Going was 4am to 3pm so 11 hours, but I think 10 hours would have been more 'normal' if Alamo hadn't been so slow.
We might drive next year (if I can persuade DH) as we probably will have to go in half-term so the chances of such cheap flights are nil. I would have preferred to have had our own car - the visibility round corners in the Megane we hired was terrible, and I managed to prang it in the underground carpark.
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skimom, well done. The journeys sound grim, especially the long wait for car hire. I'd hate that, but then I drove all night to get down here, which isn't everybody's cup of tea either. I have done many holidays with a similar attitude to food, including on boats, where I've had carrier bags with the bits needed for each day in the under seat lockers (which are a hassle, and you don't want to be swimming round in there, feeling slightly seasick, wondering where that tin of tuna has gone). I remember one of my sons coming across the Thursday bag, when I'd sent him for the Tuesday bag, and pointing out that it looked very meagre! However Wednesday was a "shop for fresh stuff" day, so they didn't starve! Pre-planning is vital on that sort of day though I always have enough stuff on hand to make an emergency meal. We are buried in snow today - so we'll eat whatever we've got, no way am I getting the car out of the garage.
Just goes to show that it's "each to his own" on holiday. Interested to hear how the skiing went too, when you've got a moment.
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skimom, I thought it was a very good report and you have got the self-catering bit down to a fine art. We didn't ski with our children till they were about 9, 11 and 13 and had such huge appetites by then I was grateful that we were in a small gasthof in Austria that churned out masses of food - nothing fancy or exotic but always plenty of it. With smaller children I am sure it must be easier to self-cater.
Interestingly we have just had a few meals with friends who have come out from the UK and in three cases they had travelled with a huge frozen casserole - they knew what they were getting from their own butcher, didn't have to immediately shop here and cooking for a crowd it just seemed easier. One of those flew - so as long as it had stayed frozen it would not have been classed as a liquid!
As pam-w says it is very much 'each to his own' and if doing it this way means you can have the ski holiday then all for the best.
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skimom,
We usually do something similar, I enjoy my holidays and the only way I can get as many a I do is by keeping costs reasonably low. Sounds like you are much more organised on the catering side of things and as we go only in school holidays our travel costs are a fair bit more.
Usually go with another family which means the catering is shared out and usually a sociable occasion with some wine rather than a chore. The things we always look for is adequate size of appartment so everyone can have a bit of space (our children are now early teens) and a dish washer so washing up is not a pain.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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skimom, i'd be sending a note to Alamo about that wait, if I were you. might make your holiday (or a future one) even cheaper!
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I thought about it Arno, but on the grounds I scratched their car thought I'd wait to see what comeback there was on that before raising my head above the parapet so to speak.
How long do you think before I will know if they are going to charge me? we had to do a key drop off, so nobody checked it in.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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| skimom wrote: |
| We might drive next year (if I can persuade DH) as we probably will have to go in half-term so the chances of such cheap flights are nil. I would have preferred to have had our own car - the visibility round corners in the Megane we hired was terrible, and I managed to prang it in the underground carpark. |
Depends where you go. You'll be very lucky to get anything for £51.25/head, but there are cheapish HT flights available to Munich (for most Austrian resorts) and probably to other places as well. Driving is quite jolly too, though, and an overnight stay en route needn't break the bank if you can stick Formule 1 (if you like camping, you'll love Formule 1, it's a bit like camping indoors).
On the subject of the prang to the car, did they check it when you took it back? They often don't and, in my experience, they don't then do you for any damage; that's happened to me several times, including once when the driver's door was very bashed in, courtesy of some traditional Italian driving. Never heard a thing from the hire co.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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| Quote: |
but on the grounds I scratched their car thought I'd wait to see what comeback there was on that before raising my head above the parapet so to speak.
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skimom, sounds like a great holiday - ours are very similar.
We drive from UK and probably take a fair amount of stuff with us and then shop in valley - both of which save on in-resort costs.
Many resorts offer family discounts on lift tickets as well which are worth booking.
We're of again soon and I reckon the total cost will be just over £2000 for the 5 of us
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You know it makes sense.
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OP:
sometimes travelling at anti social hours isnt worth the money saved
being exhausted isnt fun, with kids? must be a nightmare!
glad you had a nice trip
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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| richmond wrote: |
| skimom wrote: |
| We might drive next year (if I can persuade DH) as we probably will have to go in half-term so the chances of such cheap flights are nil. I would have preferred to have had our own car - the visibility round corners in the Megane we hired was terrible, and I managed to prang it in the underground carpark. |
Depends where you go. You'll be very lucky to get anything for £51.25/head, but there are cheapish HT flights available to Munich (for most Austrian resorts) and probably to other places as well. Driving is quite jolly too, though, and an overnight stay en route needn't break the bank if you can stick Formule 1 (if you like camping, you'll love Formule 1, it's a bit like camping indoors).
On the subject of the prang to the car, did they check it when you took it back? They often don't and, in my experience, they don't then do you for any damage; that's happened to me several times, including once when the driver's door was very bashed in, courtesy of some traditional Italian driving. Never heard a thing from the hire co. |
We are used to the long drives through France as we tend to go to Dordogne or Vendee (usually both) in the summer.
They didn't check the car when we took it back because it was 4.30am!!! I am not sure whether to phone the excess insurance people and forewarn them that there might be a claim, or just to leave it. My friend had a similar experience in Croatia - her hire car got bashed on a campsite (she has no idea how but they hadn't driven it at all). They had to return it out of hours, they couldn't find a petrol station so had also to leave it half-empty and were worried because they had a £900 excess and had decided not to pay for it to be insured. She got a bill for the petrol, but nothing for the damage and she says they couldn't have missed it as it was a huge dunt in the rear.
From a distance it didn't look bad - up close there a few scrapes in the plastic bumper - but hubby reckons there is a crack in the rear reflector as well.
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Poster: A snowHead
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skimom, you're probably OK, then. They know that they can't prove when the damage was done (perhaps after you parked it), so they may not bother. I'm sure that they are well insured anyway, so unless you have a particularly sensitive conscience, I'd forget about it.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Thanks for the review - it was very useful and you sound similar to me. We are in the process of booking for next year and will be going self catering I think. (with flights) My youngest is fussy with food and eating out or having food cooked differently to what's he's used to can be a bit of a nightmare. Good to know you're allowed to take food out with you from here. Are there any restrictions on what you take (i know there will be a few but where would I find out?).
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Bravo skimom.
Though I met someone who lived in his camper van in the Les Arcs car park and played his guitar in the bars in the evening to help pay for the rest, so you have some way to go yet.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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| kapow wrote: |
| Thanks for the review - it was very useful and you sound similar to me. We are in the process of booking for next year and will be going self catering I think. (with flights) My youngest is fussy with food and eating out or having food cooked differently to what's he's used to can be a bit of a nightmare. Good to know you're allowed to take food out with you from here. Are there any restrictions on what you take (i know there will be a few but where would I find out?). |
I think the only things you can't take are fresh meat and dairy - but we had ham and cheese sandwiches in our handluggage and that was let through... so maybe even that is only outside the EU?
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| Quote: |
I think the only things you can't take are fresh meat and dairy
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I checked this recently and as far as I can tell from various Gov websites there are no restrictions currently in place. We will be sticking a load of frozen meat in coolbag for our drive down soon
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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Great work, Skiing Holidays are about the skiing not eating a load of average food anyway.
Last week in Flaine we made packed lunch everyday - a Baguette sandwich with Tuna Mayo etc and a couple of chocolate bars, a can of kronenbourg - find a rock in the sun and bobs your uncle, don't have to listen to any braying brits or gauloise smoking frenchies! And the best views are free.
Similar for dinner, stocked up once down the week in Cluses and cooked up a feast at the flat ever night....eating exactly what we wanted.
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Very warm here in Les Gets - so out at 9 and back home by 1.30 or 2.00 for lunch on our own balcony, where I knocked up a salad from all sorts of bits in the fridge today - OH commented that it would have been at least 14 euros worth out on the mountain. The warmer weather is certainly looking kindly on all the picnicking and there are groups hugely enjoying their own food.
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oh... I want to go again.... must resist, got no money (and just realised go not passport! it runs out in 2 weeks...)
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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skimom, Your economy drive sounds very similar to ours apart from we drove down to Samoens. We ate out one night but it was baguettes on the slopes and mini choccy bars in pockets all the way - something I haven't done since being a student. We bought daily ski passes as we knew we would be spending a few days on the Debutants slopes with the kids. Only the 3 year old had the full 6 days Grand Massif pass! (we should have gone at Christmas before the other one turned 5!) We also used snowell for the kids ski hire. I think it was about £60 for two complete 'baby' packages - they were the only people I found to include helmets in the package price.
I haven't worked out how much we spent yet but our chalet was £500, ferry was £49 return, we filled up with diesel twice on way down, once on way back (and at Luton, 15 miles from home) avoided tolls on return journey but don't remember them being excessive on way down (middle of night blur). 29 euros for Formula 1 on way back (3rd adult had her own room which she paid for)
And as a bonus - the chalet we use has a washing machine so not much washing to bring back.
A few years ago self catering, washing, staying in at night would have been no holiday for me but having young kids certainly changes things 
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| Quote: |
A few years ago self catering, washing, staying in at night would have been no holiday for me but having young kids certainly changes things
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Yup, it vastly increases the amount of cooking, cleaning and housework.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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We had a part of 8 this year and due to some careful shopping and cooking all food, and freezing before we drove out we catered for 8 people for breakfast, lunch and dinner for £150 quid, which makes it approx. £20/ head for breakfast (cereal porridge), lunch (usually quiche/jacket pots pasta and homemade soups) and evening meal ( curry/ chorizo and butter bean stew/tartiflette/fondu/ beef borginonne/chilli/lasagne/goulash etc). + varying puds
We had an afternoon cooking before we went and put all food into foil containers with lids, froze it and kept it in an electric cool box during the drive to france.
We spent a further £80 on beers and bread and milk in france! mainly beer though!
We also do washing before returning! But I'd rather economize than not go at all.
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