Can you go on a skiing holiday with a baby?

The addictiveness of ski and snowboarding holidays doesn’t diminish just because you’ve had a baby. But with ski school still a couple of years away, it’s time to get creative to make sure you still get your well earned time on the slopes. Given that you’ve probably already had to forego one season (no one wants to see an elephant on skis), missing another isn’t an appealing option.

Taking a baby on a ski trip is possible, it just takes a few tweaks to your normal arrangements and plenty of planning. Here are 10 tips that worked for us:

 

• 1. Finding other snow enthusiasts with similarly aged kids to share your trip, and childcare.
  We went with a couple with a year old, and friends of theirs we’d never met with a 7 month old. We were all in the same boat, happy to take our crèche shift in exchange for some ski time.

 



• 2. Hire a chalet.
  This way you get to match your requirements and self cater according to what you and the baby’s need; if you are lucky this will be a few pouches from Ella’s Kitchen for the wee ones and plenty of wine for you!

 

• 3.Make it easy.
  We went back to the Secret Chalet in France which we had been to in the summer. We don’t usually go back to the same place twice but we knew the chalet was picturesque and well equipped and it made our first trip with baby seem more manageable.

 

• 4. Work out a schedule.
  We ended up with one full day per couple and 4 half days. We were even able to cut costs by sharing lift passes, 4 between 6 of us. You may need to be flexible (you never know when a bad baby night will clobber you) but again, you’ll all be sympathetic to the vagaries of small children.

 

• 5. Fly from a local airport, it will save you time and effort even if it costs a bit more.

 



• 6. Arrange airport parking.
  With the amount of luggage you’ll need to take you won’t want to be faffing about with taxis and you’ll be so grateful to hop back into your own car when you finally touchdown back home. We got a great rate with Skypark Secure for parking at Bournemouth Airport.

 

• 7. Hire a car
  It will be so much easier for supermarket runs and maximising your time. We recommend Auto-Europe.co.uk as they do great deals on family sized cars in Europe.

 

• 8. If you’re sharing accommodation with skiers without kids try not to feel too bad as your little monsters disrupt dinner or monopolise conversation- they knew what they were signing up for, and they’ll get to play in the snow all day tomorrow!

 

• 9. Have a cooking rota.
  Even though dinner prep will land slap bang in the middle of the bedtime routine you can always cheat on your night with easier dishes, and it means that you don’t have to worry about feeding yourselves for much of the week.

 

• 10. Take plenty of toys! You’ll need to fill the time on your baby watch and going out may not be a feasible option.

And finally- enjoy! Time on the slopes feels even better when you know how much you’ve earned it!