Grand Hotel Des Bains Kempinski

Very International Crowd

This is a 5 star older hotel that has been renovated and is beautiful. It is across the street and through a pedestrian tunnel to the cable car that accesses St Moritz ski slopes. So it is not really ski-in ski-out but a 5 minute walk. If the cable car is not running, you need to take a free shuttle bus 10 minutes into town and walk about 100 steps uphill to the cog railway. Thenup stairs again to second cog railway to mid-mountain. The hotel has 3 restaurants, the "included dinners" menu is very limited, so you will end up eating off the ala carte menus, which are superb European quality food. They give a 95 franc/person credit if you decide to eat ala carte, so it is not really an issue. While the lift tickets and ski rental are quite inexpensive by US ski resort are standards, the prices of the food at the hotel itself are astronomical. (A hamburger in the lobby bar is 69 swiss francs, and a deciliter of house wine is 18 francs, tax and tip included!). On the mountain, the food is more reasonable, but when you take into consideration the quality of the food you are getting for the money vs. the junk food at US resorts, it is probably quite reasonable. The hotel staff are wonderful and very helpful, top notch ski equipment can be rented on site and they provide very discounted lift tickets. The only negative with the hotel when we were there were the large number of spoiled brat Russian children running around the dining rooms, climbing on furniture, screaming, etc.) Pick your week carefully to avoid school vacations and this is a great resort if you dont mind the prices in Switz, which considering tax and tips are included on the food, are not really much worse than in Aspen or Vail. While the actual snow conditions are not much better than the Rockies, there is more variety, and the lift tickets much cheaper. And the chairlifts have pull down domes and heated seats.

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