Ski holidays: What happens when transfer day goes wrong in the Alps?

Five pounds per minute: that is how much some people will pay to fly from the UK to Switzerland this weekend. A no-frills seat on a one-way easyJet flight from Gatwick to Geneva, gateway to the French Alps, has been selling for £573.

I delved around to find a proper package ski holiday from any UK airport to anywhere in the French Alps on Saturday, without success; even for February half-term 2019, the cheapest deal I could find for a family of four with Inghams, booking a year ahead, is over £4,000.

Every parent of school-age children knows that holiday prices soar during this precious week. For travel firms, the upside rewards come with a downside risk. Anyone selling (or buying) a winter trip amid the highest mountains in western Europe must accept that the essential synchronicity may not work as elegantly as it should.

On a normal transfer day, a wave of planes takes off from the UK to various airports in the foothills. Simultaneously, a fleet of coaches filled with skiers whose holidays are over descends from high-altitude resorts. As the homeward people check in, their outbound counterparts touch down, ready to board the now-empty buses.

Over the weekend of 30 and 31 December, though, when Christmas holidaymakers were due to swap places with those on a New Year getaway, atrocious weather meant some outbound holidaymakers spent their first night in a municipal gymnasium.

From the moment Sasha Karakusevic touched down in Chambery with Crystal on 30 December, things started to unravel. “We waited three hours to leave the airport and as a result joined a huge queue of traffic. The toilets on the coach were unusable and the driver refused to stop, so you can imagine what fun that was.”

After nine hours, the bus had travelled just 50 miles to the town of Moutiers – whereupon the driver announced he had run out of hours. “Crystal could not find other drivers or alternatives and therefore put us on a gym floor.”

Crystal says: “We worked hard to ensure our customers were able to travel home or to their resort at the earliest convenience.”

While the Moutiers gymnistas knew their resort beds awaited next day, holidaymakers heading home faced uncertainty. Many planes, unable to hang around any longer, returned empty to the UK. So Pip Tyler, overseas director of Neilson, spent the last weekend of 2017 continuously on duty.

All the outbound holidaymakers reached their beds, he says. “An avalanche on the road to the Three Valleys almost flummoxed us, but the authorities worked hard to clear it at midnight.”

Not all homeward travellers were so lucky. “We had two coaches break snow chains, and one got wedged in the resort by abandoned cars; we needed a tractor to tow it out.

“These delays, along with the slow roads, meant they missed flights.”

Mr Tyler’s credit card got busy booking hotel rooms that night and flights the next day on British Airways and easyJet. “We found 100 seats back to London and arranged onward travel to Stansted where they had started.”

But 42 people heading for Birmingham and Bristol were not so lucky: there were no seats from any Alpine airport to either city for the remainder of 2017. So he chartered a coach, found two drivers so it could motor straight through, and booked a spot on a Dover-Calais ferry. The bus was bound for Bristol, with a second coach to meet them at the port to decant the Birmingham passengers.

Pip Tyler had hoped to welcome 2018 at his home in Brighton. Instead, though, he headed for the supermarket. And then, through the dwindling hours of the old year, to Dover.

“As it was obvious they would see the New Year in on the M25,” he says, “I went to meet the coaches and distribute bubbles and food.”

Even without such spontaneous catering, the costs must have been astronomical. How often, I wondered, does transfer day go so awry?

“It’s been three years since the last transfer incident,” says the Neilson man. “Not too bad, considering the conditions we operate in.

“Lessons learned and we will be better next time.”