Hotel Les Pistes

The location is excellent, directly opposite the lifts, and the food is actually pretty good. That said, I might stay somewhere else and use La Bianca for the occasional dinner. La Bianca is an independent ground-floor restaurant that also serves the hotel, and when it's busy, the restaurant guests get priority over the hotel diner. Thursday was particularly bad. The manager explained that they're always short staffed then, leaving one person to run the bar and serve dinner. Our 3-course meal took over 2 hours. The rooms are very tired and overdue for a facelift. Our balcony was full of weeds, had no furniture, and its broken lock rattled in the wind.

This is a really good base for a winter sport holiday, especially with kids. The slopes are visible from the hotel and the lift is 2 minutes away, making the location SO GOOD. Staff were friendly and helpful, and the rooms were warm, clean, and perfectly fine as a base, even if not lavish. The lower levels might be noisy, but our ear plugs solved that. Coffee was good and the food was nice. Great value, and I'd return.

The evening meals were the hotel's strongest feature. The half-board food was very good and tasty, although the evening menu was somewhat limited. We did ask for French fries with a lasagne and were charged €16 for two portions, nearly the price of the house wine. Breakfast was hit and miss, and the eggs overcooked in the bain marie if you didn't take them fresh, which disappointed me because I prefer a runny egg. Coffee IS included, but you have to ask at the bar. The hotel isn't the quiet ski-in ski-out stay Crystal Ski advertised. It's a short walk across a road and up steps to the lifts. The room matched the photos, but the mattress wasn't comfortable, ventilation was limited to the balcony door, and there was a small amount of mould. Ski lockers come with your own key, though there's no boot-drying space, so our boots stayed in the room and were abit smelly.

The food, staff, and service were amazing, and access to the piste is easy. If you book here, get a mountain view room on the piste side. We were on the other side and the 2 irish pubs and nightclub next door kept us awake every night from 1-5am. So get GOOD earplugs, or, if you can't beat em, join em!!