Bardonecchia Holidays

The few good moments on this trip were buried under stress and unsafe skiing. Would I come back? You couldn’t pay me to. We’d had an amazing time in Finland the year before, and only wished we’d stayed longer. Bardonecchia was presented in our research and YouTube videos as a quiet, family-friendly resort with empty slopes, so we booked two weeks feeling confident. We were very wrong. I have no issue with the town itself. The locals are friendly, the shops are great, and the scenery is stunning. It’s lovely to walk around and see the churches and mountain views. The local children were the exception: obnoxious and rude, often throwing snowballs at tourists who weren’t expecting them. The slopes were busy and packed with ski schools, not quiet at all. The morning queue for the main chairlift was a shambles and took ages. Children pushed and barged through with no manners. The six-lane gate feeding into a four-seat chairlift also creates a ridiculous bottleneck that needs attention. The ski schools felt genuinely dangerous. Three different instructors nearly hit me because they weren’t watching what was around them. Groups and instructors would pull out in front of me and block the full width of the slope. On my last run after getting hurt, students were falling everywhere and instructors had stopped whole groups in the middle of the run. Pure chaos. I lost the last three days of my holiday after a ski school blocked a chairlift exit. A student crossed through the only open gap and took me out. Two weeks later my ankle was still very swollen, and I suspected it was worse than I first thought. My knee hurt too. The instructor did nothing, just watched me struggle to get up after falling at an awkward angle. I plan to post videos so people can see what it was really like. Does no child in Italy go to school?