Skiing with a baby and with friends without kids!

[maswera]

Can someone explain to me the child care options for skiing with babies (13 months) please? My understanding is the options are: private nanny (eye wateringly expensive), local creche (if available, and if they take under 2s) or mark-warner-style family package where you go to a chalet that has childcare. Have been looking at the latter as creche on site would be handiest, but the problem there is that we are going with a fairly big group of people without kids, so if everyone stays at the child-care-friendly chalet, they will all be paying the premium but without actually needing the family friendly option. So would the best option be for the group to sort out a package that suits everyone, and then for us to find a local creche for the baby? Are these generally available/any good? Am I missing anything else?

You could go with a family skiing company (Family Ski, Ski Famille, Esprit etc) so that sorting childcare separately doesn't turn into a stress.

Ime, the prices are pretty standard for the usual board and lodge and you just pay the extra for childcare so your friends shouldn't notice any difference. If you can find a chalet that fits your group perfectly then your group will only have your dc to consider, rather than other families and their dc.

I can wholeheartedly recommend Family Ski Company .

How about something like this place in Grand Massif?

www.alpsinstyle.com/chalet-esprit/

Chalet Esprit looks lovely for both families OR people without kids. However they do have an inhouse babysitting and childcare system in place if you need it.

Also this one can recruit an English childminder for you to come in and look after the baby while you go out ski-ing.

www.chaletsinsamoens.com

I would decide where you want to go with your children, to a child friendly hotel/chalet (in a big resort like tignes or les gets or somewhere). say somewhere with esprit and i would ask my friends to book their accomodation in that resort, but not necessarily at that chalet/hotel. then people can meet up when they like, and you cn stay in with all the other mummy's and daddy's, or get babysitting and go out with your mates.

A friend of mine hires private chalets and contacts the local Tourist Office beforehand for a list of approved babysitters who will come to your chalet and do in house babysitting. I suspect this may be expensive....not sure.

However if you go with Mark Warner/Esprit type set up I don't think that the childless friends are paying a premium for a child friendly company. You have to pay extra for any creche, nursery, snow club, etc that you use. So if you don't have kids then you don't pay the extra.

We went with Esprit last year even though we didn't use any childcare at all as it was the cheapest deal we could find.

we've used all of the above options (english speaking nanny, local creche/ daycare etc) ds1 first used resort daycare when he was 10 weeks old.

all of my three had used the daycare options by 13 mos with v little trouble (some resorts also have pagers so that you can get back to breastfeed on-demand babies)

i think you need to start with where everyone wants to go. most resorts have childcare options and then you can sift through them accordingly. i would say that in an all-adult group they might not want to hang out in a particularly family-centric place, so doing it that way round is probably better.

prepare for a fairly bumpy ride though. holidaying with friends with no kids and an out of routine toddler can be, um, a draining experience. especially if they want to drink until 2am and then be up for first tracks...

How many are in your party? I'm just thinking that perhaps you could hire out a chalet so you wouldn't be left out of the evening socialising. Your child can be sleeping upstairs while you eat, drink and are merry with your friends. During the day you could use the resort creche for as many hours as you want. We did that in Switzerland in Feb and it was actually pretty good. And that was in a small resort (Flims), that doesn't really cater at all to an English-speaking clientele.