Presidents’ Week Moves to the Alps: Why America’s Ski Families Are Crossing the Atlantic

Haute Retreats, the Miami-based luxury villa and concierge company founded by Sabrina Piccinin in 2016, represents staffed chalets in two of France’s best-known ski resorts, Courchevel and Val d’Isère. For a growing number of American families, Presidents’ Week no longer means Aspen or Vail by default. It means an overnight flight to Geneva.

The shift shows up in the official counts. In the 2024–25 winter, American overnight stays in Switzerland rose 13.4 percent, to 1.7 million for the season, American visitors to Austria rose 15.4 percent, and American visits to France rose 10.6 percent, according to figures gathered by the British ski publication PlanetSKI. The 2025–26 season went further still: Swiss hotels reported their best American winter in three decades.

The passes tell the same story. At Zermatt, roughly one skier in five is now American. At Dolomiti Superski in Italy, Ikon Pass customers were up 30 percent, to 12,350, by the middle of the 2024–25 season.

Part of it is price. Research by the British operator SNO put a day’s lift ticket at Vail at $322, against about $101 in Les 3 Vallées, the French ski area that includes Courchevel. Part of it is scale: Les 3 Vallées runs to some 600 kilometers of linked pistes, four to six times the size of the largest American resorts. And part of it is access. The Epic Pass now reaches 34 European resorts, among them Verbier and Les 3 Vallées, while the Ikon Pass covers 24 Alpine destinations, including Chamonix and Zermatt.

Then there is the experience at home. Crowding at the big Colorado and Utah resorts, reservation systems at places like Telluride, and thin snow in parts of the Rockies have all nudged families who once never left the country to look east.

In 2027, Presidents’ Day is Monday, Feb. 15. That is also the first day of half-term for nearly every school in England, 143 of the country’s 153 councils, and Family Day across most of Canada. In the Alps, it is one of the most contested weeks of the winter, and Americans are the newest arrivals to it.

The British have been booking it for a year. By February of this year, the ski agency Iglu was already reporting half-term 2027 as its most popular week. Haute Retreats advises 12 to 18 months’ notice in the French Alps for Christmas, New Year and the February holiday week, and its Courchevel guide, published in August, gave the February week roughly sixty days of full choice. That window has now all but closed.

For an American family new to the French Alps, the choice usually narrows to these two. Courchevel 1850 is the polished one, with an altiport for private aircraft and helicopters and direct access to Les 3 Vallées. Chalet La Datcha, in the Chenus quarter, is a fair picture of the staffed tier there: five en-suite bedrooms for ten, an indoor pool and hammam, and a chef in residence.

Chalet Courchevel, higher up in the Nogentil district, is built for the larger family: room for 14 across seven bedrooms, each with its own bath, steps from the Bellecôte piste, and a butler, chef and resort driver on the team.

Val d’Isère, at the head of the Tarentaise valley, is the skier’s choice. It shares its terrain with Tignes, keeps its lifts turning into early May, and has more life in the evenings for teenagers who have outgrown the chalet.

Americans used to renting a ski house in Colorado should know that a staffed Alpine chalet works differently. The team usually includes a chef, a butler or chalet manager, daily housekeeping and a driver within the resort, but the chef’s groceries and the wine list are typically billed at cost on top of the rental, as they are at both chalets above. Weeks often run Sunday to Sunday rather than Saturday to Saturday, which matters when booking the overnight flight. And the driver who takes the family to the lifts is not always the one who collects it from Geneva; La Datcha, for one, lists the Geneva transfer as an add-on.

Getting there is simpler than many first-timers expect. From Geneva, Courchevel is roughly two and a half hours by road, and less than half an hour by helicopter to the altiport; Val d’Isère is about three hours by car. From the East Coast, an overnight flight lands in Geneva in the morning, and a family can be on the snow the same afternoon.

“Americans are used to Presidents’ Week in the Rockies, where something can usually be found in January,” says Piccinin. “The Alps run on a different clock. The British have held that week for a year, and the staffed chalets are the first to go. A family that decides this month still has a choice of resort. A family that waits until after the holidays will still get to the Alps. It just won’t be choosing the house.”

For a family weighing its first February in Europe, that is the practical answer: settle the resort and the house before Thanksgiving, and leave the ski school, restaurant tables and the rest of the week to the concierge.