It has been the best year on record for ski bargains, and while the lowest prices are on offer from entry level resorts, the best skiing is also available at knockdown rates.
If you want the best skiing, follow the French, and medieval Val d'Isère and its modern twin Tignes have been their favourite for 70 years. It helps that this was home to their most famous Olympic skier, a descendant from the Wild Geese Kelly family, Jean-Claude Killy.
If you are travelling late this season, Tignes is France's most snow-sure resort, extremely popular with the French, a lot of British and a concoction of other nationalities.
Tignes stays open for skiing for 10 months of the year and is a mandatory summer destination for national ski teams in training and for the growing number of people who can't last from season to season without snow beneath their feet.
The glacier used to be open 365 days a year, but the combination of damage from global warming, and a falling interest in summer skiing over the past decade has caused the resort to 'rest' from mid-May until mid-June and again from early September until October.
During the summer months 13 lifts serve 20km of high-altitude pistes with a respectable vertical drop of 750m. Tignes is connected by lifts and pistes to Val d'Isère, forming a 90-lift area with 300km of piste that is known as L'Espace Killy. For a high altitude sport this is the topmost level. It has few equals for the diversity of its skiing and riding.
The main resort, built at 2100m, is a 1960s architectural nightmare, an atrocity completely out of keeping with its beautiful setting beneath the twin peaks of La Grande Motte and La Grande Casse.
Being French they have been doing their best to repair the damage, investing billions in the effort to transform Tignes into a much more aesthetically pleasing place. The newer buildings were constructed in a sympathetic mountain style and the older ones torn down one by one for redevelopment.
Everyone can still find a silent place to ski somewhere along the 360km of piste between Val d'Isère and the nearby Tignes. It might be the snow, but some of the piste graders got colour blind when they came up this far. Some of the green and blue and red slopes are not the same in Val d'Isère as elsewhere. But for red skiers there is a run called the Matisse, a heavenly descent to lift the heart to Alpine heights.
Veteran skiers can try out steep pistes, such as the Face de Bellevarde, the glorious, long, black descent to Les Brevieres and the l'epaule de Charvet and the unrelenting bumps which keep the good skier on the tips of his boots.
History hangs as heavy as the snow stacked on the lodge roofs. Every inch of the road from Toulouse airport is full of history from when Savoy was one of the most famous regal names in Europe.
At any altitude this would be a fashionable and atmospheric shopping town. The apartments, bars, restaurants and hotels full of revellers extend the length of a street which always feels wider because of the mounds of snow. Throw in the fir trees and fairy lights, to give that extended Christmassy feel to everything, and you have a magical otherworld feel to the entire village.
At night revellers stroll the streets while the lights of the piste grooming equipment flicker in the mountains above and the distant boom of avalanche-detonators clears the off-piste regions.
The tiny original Val d'Isère village still slumbers behind a 14th century church. Here, a cluster of narrow streets give a small sense of what life must have been like for the goat's cheese farmers before the first ski lift was built in 1932. The road came to a stop here, the highest road into the Alps, but it now weaves 60km further to the Italian border.
The small houses and farmers' cottages are still there, intact and left well alone, and the cheapest restaurants are at this end of the village. The cuisine includes the famous local fondue, freshwater fish, crayfish, mushrooms, potatoes, gratins prepared with potatoes, eggs and bouillon. Also worth trying is genepy, the local version of the edelweiss flower which is fermented and drunk in post-piste sessions.
Check out Crepe Vals, particularly if you have a family in tow. It boasts 200 crepes and Breton galettes, super fondues and 20 salads, all for less than the cost of a meal out closer to the Boyne than the Isère. There is even a rugby theme pub owned by former French player Pierre Mattis.
The resort is geared for families.
The children will find excellent instruction from highly rated schools such as Snow Fun and lots to do in the evenings. Accommodation ranges from premium rates at the classy hotels to self catering apartments, ideal for young families or singles.
It started, as most skiing tales did, in the days before gondolas and four-chairs, with a long, slow climb to the top. A soldier from Tipperary established his reputation in Napoleon's army. He settled down with a French woman, and four generations later those Glen of Aherlow genes provided the greatest champion the mountains have ever seen.
As the memory of the exploits of Jean-Claude Killy fades, the resort he made famous in the 1960s is as famous as ever. Val d'Isère is snow-crystal chic, where Bono and Gerard Depardieu stopped in last year, and where the world comes to snow and skiboard the massive Espace Killy.
With Mont Blanc on one side, and the white vistas of Italy, Switzerland and France at every turn, you can see why when they started designing ski resorts, they chose Val d'Isère. The world's first ski lift was built here in 1934, and ever since then they have that confident French pride in their reputation for early snow.
Celebrity visitors come second nature around here. Bono and Depardieu follow a longstanding tradition of A-list celebs which goes back to Hannibal and Napoleon, bringing their armies across one of the main roads into Italy.
Today's army come with skis and poles and you can see them waiting for the free bus service that brings holidaymakers to an array of lifts, gondolas and funiculars along the resort. During the French midterm (definitely to be avoided) they can put 50,000 skiers on the mountain here, so effortlessly you would wonder whether Irish local authorities know the meaning of the word infrastructure.
There is even an Irish ski instructor, one of only two on the Alps. Aidan Cassells comes from Lurgan and learned on artificial slopes. He is part of a long standing teaching tradition that brings skiers of all levels to Val d'Isère to brush up their skiing on the acres of slopes.
Topflight has a full time rep based here for the growing Irish traffic to the resort, Alan Dagg from a famous Irish sporting family. Top Flight's brochure is available at your local ITAA travel agent or telephone 2401700 for details. Val d'Isère also has its own dedicated ski brochure available from specialist ski operators.
Eoghan Corry
