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A former season worker reveals what really goes on behind the scenes at your ski hotel – and it’s often bonkers.
ADVERTISEMENTAs a travel writer who writes regularly about ski holidays, I’ll typically spend a decent chunk of every winter being wined and dined by tour operators keen to showcase their newest slope-side hotel. And, as someone who spent several winters working as a hotel host in various European ski resorts, I can’t resist the occasional interrogation of the hotel employee pouring my wine or the housekeeper cleaning my room. Not simply because of a curiosity relating to whether their experiences differ from mine but for nostalgic reasons and because, despite the downsides, the months I spent working in ski resorts were amongst the best of my life.‘It made The Shining’s Overlook Hotel look like Versailles’Don’t get me wrong – it’s hard work for low pay. During my first season, I earned €50 a week, and my fellow season workers included alcoholic chefs and tyrannical managers. But then there are the upsides – the free lift pass, the endless days flying down untouched pistes and the sense of camaraderie that comes with uprooting your life and spending an entire winter with a bunch of strangers who are highly likely to become friends for life.However, that shared togetherness amongst staff at the lower links of the food chain doesn’t typically extend to management. My first ski season was in the Italian resort of Courmayeur. My hotel manager was a former banker who had suffered a nervous breakdown and decided to shun the urgent psychiatric treatment she clearly needed in favour of doing her first working ski season – despite hating Italy, snow and quite possibly all human beings. She immediately installed herself in one of the swankiest guest bedrooms while the rest of us were confined to staff bedrooms in the basement. To be clear, as a season worker you get used to basement bedrooms – but this one was a cold concrete shell with no furniture or windows.By Christmas, the entire workforce was exhausted from the constant guest complaints about the decrepit state of the hotel. My morale was admittedly at an all-time low, and on Christmas Eve, I received a call from my area manager informing me that I was going to be sacked and sent home. While I wasn’t exactly loving my stint working in a hellhole that made The Shining’s Overlook Hotel look like Versailles, I loved being in the mountains. So, I responded by bringing my area manager up to speed about recent events. Notable incidents included our alcoholic chef skiing down the stairs at 3am, and our hotel manager letting random villagers stay for reduced rates that were paid directly into her bank account – you get the idea.Two days later, I was informed I was being transferred to the French resort of Courchevel. This is why I ended up spending Christmas Day being driven through a blizzard by my hotel manager – before being handed over to my new one on a bleak mountainside somewhere near the French border. It was a surreal scenario that resembled a hostage exchange. In Europe’s swankiest resort, tips are generous and unusualCourchevel, with its nightclubs and Michelin-starred restaurants, felt like Las Vegas after Courmayeur. There were regular dedicated events for season workers, ranging from bar crawls to skiing competitions. We also had a weekly newsletter documenting all the antics (the main topics of discussion appeared to be who was sleeping with whom). Guests were nicer, wealthier and more generous with their tips, albeit not necessarily traditional ones. ADVERTISEMENTOn one occasion, I was approached by a group of hard-drinking (but friendly) male guests whose rooms I’d come to dread cleaning – they were checking out and didn’t have any Euros with which to tip me. So instead, they decided to present me with the bag of marijuana they’d purchased the night before – despite not recalling doing so.Courchevel was – and still is – one of Europe’s swankiest ski resorts. Luckily, most of the bars offered generous discounts for ski workers, although our meagre wages still called for various cost-saving measures, namely necking so much of the acid-like hotel wine before heading out that we would struggle to stay upright by the time we reached the bar.Dodgy decor and late-night romancing in TignesI also spent a season working in Tignes as a hotel housekeeper, staying in another basement room with no heating. ADVERTISEMENTIt was only halfway through the season when I realised there was an entire additional floor of staff accommodation below me – a dank, windowless labyrinth of bedrooms used by the hotel’s chefs. The budget didn’t stretch to fixing my smashed bedroom window, and flurries of snow blew through the cracks. The rest of the hotel was in a similar state of disrepair, and on transfer days, I’d show my guests to their rooms before dashing for the door before they clapped their eyes on the chipped bathroom sink and blood-like stains splattered across the carpet. Dalliances between staff and guests were particularly common at this hotel. On one occasion, my co-worker heard disturbances in the bar late at night. They found the 18-year-old bar manager in flagrante with a female guest – a 40-year-old lady who’d arrived at the hotel with her husband and three children in tow. ADVERTISEMENTIf only the bar manager’s passion for customer service was shared by our hotel manager, a shaven-headed Swedish psychopath with a huge disdain for guests (and, like my Italian hotel manager, the human race). This manager was hated by his employees, and one night, a chef caught him vandalising the car of a guest who’d dared to park in his preferred spot outside the hotel. The manager instructed the entire workforce to lie to the gendarmes about the culprit, and the next day – which happened to be the night the chef in question mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night – we awoke to find a supersized depiction of male genitalia, alongside a profanity aimed at the manager, carved into the frozen lake next to our hotel. I’ve returned to both Tignes and Courchevel many times in recent years. When I do, I can’t help but smile as I pass the Courchevel bars I’d head to after my shifts finished or the slopeside hotel in Tignes where I spent one of the best winters of my life. ADVERTISEMENTAnd I’ll certainly never, ever be able to look at its lake in the same way again.
