Recommendations for next year please. Partic skiing for 3/4 yr olds, car or train travel and affordable

[katebee]

We had a fantastic skiing holiday with Snowbizz in Puy St Vincent this year..would heartily recommend this company. Their ski school was excellent for our 3 and 5 yr old children. We are now looking for next year and would ideally like somewhere where our by then 4 yr old could do a short ski class followed by creche, and that we can get to by train. Ski Esprit and Mark Warner are a bit pricey for us as we are thinking of school hols and both are flight only, so we need a company where we can travel by train or possibly self drive.. please let me have any recommendations for English companies with childcare etc. or hotels/accomodation that offer good creche/ski school etc.

We've just returned from a village called Saint Martin de Belleville, which is part of the 3 vallees (Courchevel, Meribel etc).

I highly recommend the ESF school there (Ecole de Ski Francais, a State-run organisation).

Our 3-year-old son spent an entire week there and LOVED it. He can now ski better than we can.

The creche does not look very smart, but the staff are kind and the ski instructors really fantastic. The 3- to 4-year-olds spend the morning playing at the creche, building snowmen or visiting farms in the village, and ski for 2 hours in the afternoons. You can also book half-days with them.

We stayed at the www.thealpineclub.co.uk which is not exactly cheap but they could not do enough for us. if you search online you'll find some really good self-catering deals. The village is lovely and really small scale, which is unusual for France.

Finally, it's a 20-minute car transfer from Moutiers, which has a direct train from St Pancras every Saturday in winter.

Good luck!

ski famille have great childcare, all inclusive so you don't have to book slots, and they will take the kids to and from ski school. They are based in Les Gets where there are various english speaking ski schools. it's near Geneva, so you can get the TGV via paris or drive - about 10 hours.

Thanks very much for the replies..the childcare at St Martin de Belleville sounds wonderful and it would be a good resort to go to by train. Also like the sound of Ski Famille holidays in Les Gets. Am still looking at these companies and others....the hardest thing for us is trying to find anything we can afford in school holiday time as the prices are so much higher.

We went to Leysin this year which has a great ski school which does lessons from 4years, they take them for the morning. You can get there by train from Geneva and am pretty sure you can get to Geneva by train or driving. There is an apartment for families which you can rent, details below.
It sleeps up to six people (plus cot) in three bedrooms and is within easy reach of the ski slopes and international ski school as well as village centre with shops, restaurants etc.

www.holidaylettings.co.uk/rentals/leysin/57433

Try Premiere Neige in Ste Foy, France. It's a really small family resort perfect for kids. PN have a creche service but we hired one of their private nannies when we went in March this year. Our 3 boys were blissful! You can get the snowtrain to Bourg St Maurice and Ste Foy is about 20 mins from there.
Check out www.premiere-neige.com or www.saintefoy.net

We are going with Le Ski to La Tania - self driving in March for the first time. They have their own creche/after ski school care that our (by then) 4 year old will be going into.

We chose La Tania because we have been there and know what the nursery slope area is like. As it is the first time that DD will be skiing we felt that this holiday should meet her needs more than possibly ours (went to Plan Peisey this year with Ski Beat but didn't feel the nursery area there was that great - she was purely in creche this year).

We had no problems with Ski Beat and would happily use them again, but we liked the location of the Le Ski chalets better than the Ski Beat chalets in La Tania (plus the child discount with Le Ski was better than that of Ski Beat).

L