By Jack McKeown

Copyright hellomagazine

When my daughter Grace was born in November 2024, I was over the moon. It’s a life-changing experience, and she is a little star. Of course, becoming a dad meant skiing was out of the window for at least a year or two. Or was it? Knowing my love of the slopes, my long-suffering and very understanding fiancée Eilidh told me to pack my bags and take myself off to the Alps for a week. She would stay home to look after Grace and our two golden retrievers. So it was that in early April 2025, I found myself on a plane from Edinburgh to Geneva to catch the penultimate week of the season.

Why I love skiing alone

After a relaxing train ride (the Europeans do rail travel so much better than we do), I arrived in Landry, where my hosts at Alpine 365 collected me and whisked me to my catered chalet in Montchavin. The traditional and beautiful Alpine village is perfectly placed between the two huge resorts of La Plagne and Les Arcs – collectively known as the Paradiski area. Between them, they have 425km of pisted runs, so there’s more to explore than you could cover in a week.

Our chalet was next to the gondola station that takes you up into the La Plagne area. A short ski of less than five minutes takes you to a cable car that whisks you across the valley into Les Arcs.

I’ve always been someone who’s happy with my own company. It’s not easy to talk to someone when you’re zooming down a slope anyway. And not having to stop to discuss which run to do next means more time to do more runs. There’s no waiting for anyone, and no one has to wait for you. If you’re feeling lazy in the morning, you can take your time, and if you’re having a blast on the slopes, you can stay out until the last lift.

Where to stay

My chalet in Montchavin was opposite a pub, and after each day’s skiing I’d take my Kindle across the road, have a couple of local beers and do a mix of reading and people watching. Then I’d return to the chalet where our talented chefs, husband and wife David and Mandy, would cook up a delicious meal accompanied by excellent French wine.

The nice thing about a catered chalet is that there are new people to meet. A family of four from London were beginners. It was fun to hear about their progress over dinner each evening and their excitement and trepidation about the day ahead over breakfast each morning.

There were also some intermediate skiers from the Lake District, Becky and Danny. The young couple didn’t know the area as well as I did, so we teamed up for a couple of days, and I showed them some of my favourite pistes.

Later in the week, a very capable skier called Richard arrived, and we had a terrific day blasting down some of the resort’s faster runs. We had some warm spring sunshine during my time there. On my solo days, I stashed an extra croissant and an apple at breakfast and had lunch on the chairlift or gondola to maximise my ski time. On the days I shared with my newfound ski buddies, it was nice to sit outside a mountain cafe having a slice of pizza and enjoying some conversation.

Solo trips are on the rise

I’m not the only one who enjoys skiing alone. A recent study published by global data company Statista shows that nearly half of solo travellers plan to explore more often, and skiing is part of the mix. This booming trend is reflected across social media, where the #solotravel hashtag has been used over 10 million times on Instagram.

Meanwhile, luxury chalet company VIP SKI has reported a 45 per cent increase in solo bookings over the past three seasons as more people embrace the freedom of skiing alone. The company has capitalised on this trend by offering deals that ditch the single-person supplement and guided ski hosting at some of their chalets, which are a perfect way to meet ski buddies as well as find your way around the resort.

How to make friends

This was the third time I’ve gone skiing by myself. While I’ve had plenty of days skiing alone, I’ve never had trouble finding other people to share the slopes with when I’m in the mood for some company. My first solo ski trip was to the French town of Morzine, in the heart of the gigantic Portes du Soleil area. Two single dads were there with their early teenage son and daughter. We spent three thoroughly enjoyable days skiing together as a group.

A couple of years ago, I headed to Zermatt to meet some old friends from Colorado who’d decided to ski in Europe. They were only there for four days, but I went for a week, so I was left to my own devices for a few days. By that point, I had met another solo traveller, an American hedge fund analyst who made use of the post-COVID remote working culture to spend the winter in Switzerland, skiing until 2pm, then logging on from 3-11pm to work a 9am-5pm New York day.

I had a couple of enjoyable mornings zipping round Zermatt with her, before she headed off to begin work, and I skied on until the end of the afternoon. That might be the best thing about solo skiing. If you enjoy your own company, you can have as much of it as you like. And if you want to meet people, you nearly always do. And they’re nearly always great. Of course, the greatest of all is my partner Eilidh, without whom none of this would have happened. I owe her an awful lot of French wine and Swiss chocolate.