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Chalets Direct – now on Facebook!
Become our fan on Facebook and get updates, latest news, take part in discussions, write a review, and generally join in!
Our Facebook page is where we can do some fun things and keep you abreast of all the latest goings on in the skiing and snowboarding world. So you can quickly see if there’s a new blog post, or newsletter, or new properties, or something you need to know.
It’s also your chance to get involved. Start a discussion – maybe you want some ideas about trying a new resort, you need some tips on buying new boots, you want to know when it snowed last, should you be skiing with a helmet? You can ask all these questions and more and we can get back to you. You can also share your tips, ideas and feedback with other keen skiers, boarders and mountain lovers.
Post up your ski and snowboard pictures – if you’re really proud of them why not share them? Everyone loves to see cool pics, so do it now!
Find our Facebook page at http://facebook.chaletsdirect.com and
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Subscribe to the Ski Blog by email!
You can now receive your regular bulletin from Chalets Direct's Ski Blog direct to your inbox. Email subscription to the blog is now available so it's even easier to keep up to date with what's happening in the ski world.
To subscribe just add your email address into the subscribe box and you'll be kept in the loop whenever a fresh post goes live.
The Ski Blog has been providing entertainment, ski news, and top tips for holidays in the mountains for several months now. Some of our favourite posts are Why wearing helmets won't keep you safe from July 2008, What makes a great…apres ski bar from September 2008 and of course the Coolboard series with top tips on how to get fit and stay fit for the snow.
Subscribe now so that you don't miss out – and we'd love to hear which are your favourite posts – post a comment and give us your feedback!
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Skiing in Austria? Get your personal holiday ski lines!
If you're skiing in the Austrian Ski Welt area this winter the purchase of a lift pass will now give you access to a lot more than just the lifts.
Skiline is a new service which allows you to see where you skied, for how long, how many kilometres you covered and how many vertical metres you travelled.
All you need to do is go to the www.skiline.cc, enter the code on your lift pass, and hey presto you can view a line graph of your day – with all the lifts you used, the downhill distance and lift distance covered, and the total vertical metres you've done.
It might seem a bit geeky but when you're back at work on Monday morning, you can spend a few minutes looking back at your previous week – looking at the highs and lows, and reliving the moment! You can also register with Skiline and you will then have access to your personal ski diary – where all your skilines will be viewable, along with webcam images of each skiing day. You might also find at the end of the season that you are in the Top 100 of skiers who have covered the most mileage.
It is also hoped that more services will be added in the future - including mobile phone updates letting you know how big the queues are at various lifts!
The Ski Welt is Austria's largest interconnected ski area and includes Ellmau, Sheffau and Westendorf
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New improved Solutions Room goes live – now it’s even easier to find what you’re looking for!
The Chalets Direct Solutions Room has long been a useful and pretty popular tool for skiers and snowboarders looking for that holiday with a certain "je ne sais quoi"! The Solutions Room is a different kind of bulletin board – holiday seekers post up what sort of holiday they're looking for, and then our members can come back to them with solutions. It means that you can say roughly what you want – or you can say exactly what you need – and then wait for the proposals to flood in.
Well we're glad to announce that after listening to lots of feedback we have just made live an improved super-charged Solutions Room – now it's even easier to say what you're looking for and let the answers come back to you.
What's new?
Firstly there's the Solutions wizard – this makes it easier for holiday seekers to put in their requirements. You can specify dates and places and numbers, or if you're not so sure you can just say "well I know I want to go in January, but not sure when or where. You can keep it general – in that way you'll get more options coming back. If you have specific requirements then you can say that too.
There's also the new Share on Facebook option – so if you're the group leader, charged with finding the holiday, you can put up your post and then add it to your Facebook profile – so all the group can see the progress of their holiday search.Once you have put up your post you can sit back, relax, put the kettle on and let the Solutions Room do the talking. Behind the scenes all the Chalets Direct members who can match your request are contacted and they can then respond to your post. We do recommend that you register when you create a post so that you can receive email notifications when someone replies to you.
So if you're looking for a holiday what have you got to lose – take a look at the Solutions Room here.
For Holiday Providers:
As a Chalets Direct member you choose to receive an email every time someone puts up a request that you can match. So if you've got available beds you'd like to fill – lo and behold you could find the answer in your inbox – someone's looking for exactly what you've got to offer.
The Solutions Room is a unique tool designed to put people in touch and it's just one of the ways you can use Chalets Direct.
So with snow falling in the Alps and winter definitely approaching, get your skates on (or skis, or snowboard) and check out the Solutions Room. -
Zinal and La Grave – skiing and snowboarding off piste holidays
Chalets Direct has recently added two world famous freeride areas to their list of winter holiday destinations.
Located at the end of the Anniviers Valley in the Swiss Valais area, Zinal nestles in an impressive mountain range which includes the Weisshorn (4506m), Zinalrothorn, Obergabelhorn and Dent Blanche. The north-east facing slopes ensure high quality snow throughout the season – the resort actually opens at weekends on November 8th until December 13th, when it opens fully. There are 70km of pistes and an extensive freeride area of 100 hectares, known as the Garde de Bordon. The resort also has an avalanche training centre.
La Grave has long been a favourite amongst freeride skiers and boarders, and a frequent venue for ski extreme videos. Located at an altitude of 1500m and dominated by the majestic summit of La Meije at 3983m, La Grave has been a well kept secret, shared by those in the know. It is a true mountain wilderness – reached by one cable car, or by a 20 minute hike from the top of Les Deux Alpes.
Both places are off the beaten track and offer a very different kind of wintersports holiday – pack your arvas, and to get the best out of the area book a mountain guide.
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The Latest & Greatest – Christmas ski holidays, December offers and discounts.
The Latest and Greatest newsletter from Chalets Direct has just been released, containing a selection of the ski and snowboard promotions and offers that are currently available.
For this issue we have concentrated mainly on December and early January holidays – and there are some fabulously tempting offers out there such as free lift passes for the 4 Valleys, excellent pre-Xmas prices in Nassfeld, and up to 20% off self-catered accommodation in Val Thorens on selected weeks.There are offers from resorts from Meribel to Morzine, and Grindelwald to Tignes.
These ski promotions are taken from the Chalets Direct promotions page which right now has over 500 promotions. With so many to choose from, you can search the list either by dates or by area, or simply browse the whole lot.
So if you haven’t yet booked your winter ski break and want some inspiration, just take a look at the Promotions and Special Offers – there’s sure to be something there to whet your appetite!
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Ski holiday promotions – money saving offers, and great extras available!
The build up to the ski season is well and truly underway. The kids are back at school, there’s a real autumnal feel in the air, the first Christmas cards have been spotted in the shops – all the traditional signs that winter is on it’s way.
Take a look at the Promotions area on Chalets Direct and you will find well over 300 great offers for this ski season in resorts all over Europe. The promotions include offers such as specialised ski coaching in Tignes, aimed to get intermediate skiers to ski “confidently, easily and effortlessly.” More high quality coaching and instruction is available with the Warren Smith Ski academy in Verbier during January 2009.
Money saving offers include offers on flights, free group places, discounts for booking soon, free lift passes and free child places. Discounts are available from 10% off in Morzine, Les Menuires, St Gervais, and 15% off in Grindelwald.
If the idea of a white Christmas is tempting, then there are some attractive festive offers, with traditional turkey dinners and all the trimmings, Brown Bear Lodge for example has availability for their truly special White Christmas in the Portes du Soleil, or Chalet Algonquin in Les Arcs has a fully catered Xmas week, including a 5 course Christmas dinner and present from under the tree at just £550 per adult.
There are also some great short breaks and long weekends available. A long weekend catered ski break, Wednesday to Sunday, in the Grand Massif, just an hour from Geneva airport, for example will set you back just £230.
So if you’re wondering where to spend your ski holiday this winter the Promotions and Special Offers could help you make up your mind.
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RSS feeds from Chalets Direct
Now there’s another way to get the latest Chalets Direct news direct to your desktop.
Two RSS feeds are available – one for the Ski Blog, and one which shows a selection of our Promotions. The promotions feed is updated every week. There are currently close to 300 promos and special offers available on Chalets Direct, with some very tempting ski holiday offers for this winter including free flights and free child places on holidays in La Tania in the Three Valleys, free lift passes in Les Gets, and bonus group discounts in St Anton.
The RSS feeds mean that you can get the latest news delivered to you – all you need to do is to subscribe to the feeds and they will update automatically each time something changes.
You can subscribe using an online reader such as the Google or Yahoo readers, or use one which can be downloaded. You may even find you already have a reader without even realising it – the latest versions of Outlook and Internet Explorer now have inbuilt RSS capabilities.
But if you’re starting to look for this winter’s ski holiday keep an eye on the Promotions area – this is where you can find some great ideas, maybe a champagne week in Paradiski, a girls only ski clinic week, special mini breaks for Christmas and much more.
You can browse through all the promotions available or search for offers for specific dates or areas.
So with the temperatures starting to turn autumnal, the countdown to winter has begun.
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Chalets Direct Interactive Goes Live!
Chalets Direct has now launched our Interactive area where users can get sociable!
We have always encouraged user interaction – we created the Solutions Room in autumn 1999, and since then have added more and more areas where visitors can talk to each other, such as the Ski & Board Jobs forum and the Resort Reviews section.
So now we have decided to group all these features under one heading to make it easier for visitors to get around. Our latest addition, The Ski Blog, is also part of this area.
So what’s it all about?
Well the Solutions Room is a unique bulletin board where people looking for holiday accommodation can post up what they’re looking for. Chalets Direct members can then reply to them to either match their requirements or propose alternatives. As I write,our developers are working on further enhancements of the Solutions Room which will make it more efficient for both types of users – so watch this space.
The Resort News & Reviews section is for you to post up reviews of your favourite resorts. If you had a great time there let everyone know about it and tell us why it was so good. You can post reviews in various categories, including the resort, the ski area and summer holidays. You can also post about the weather and snow conditions, which was used extensively last winter, when snow depths were exceptional. Reviewers can also put up a photo to go with their post, so we had a great gallery of snow pictures stretching from Colorado to Bansko!
Other features in the interactive area are the Ski & Board Jobs message board and the Long Stay Q&A, so if you’re looking to spend more than a week or two in the mountains these could be interesting for you.
For jobseekers take a look at the positions on offer, or post up what you’ve got to offer an employer. And for the Long Stay Q&A, if you’re looking for accommodation or need some help you may well find an answer here.
And of course there is the Ski Blog – which we hope will provide interesting information and give you a chance to give us your feedback.
So as autumn arrives, Chalets Direct is looking forward to another great winter season!
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A Little History
On a trip to Chamonix towards the end of the winter season of 1999, two of the founders of Chalets Direct were looking at hotels in the Chamonix Valley. They were developing web marketing ideas for hotels – and had spent the day finding out about the web awareness of local accommodation providers.
Don’t forget, this was spring 1999, on the brink of the first dotcom boom. Very few businesses had websites, booking travel online was still pretty unheard of, Internet access available at the time was dial-up and narrow band – and not yet cheap.
They had covered the length and breadth of Chamonix itself and so headed out to Les Praz, a charming village just a few miles out of town. Here they stopped in front of the small village church – and that was when the Eureka moment happened – although they wouldn’t put it down to divine inspiration!
Why not create a portal for ski accommodation – and because not everyone can employ designers to make websites, let’s make it easy and affordable.
The idea was not to come between the accommodation provider and the holidaymaker, there was no need to be a travel agent or a tour operator.
It was simple, as seasoned skiers, the founders knew that a ski holiday was one of the most exciting things people could do – so rather than talk to a travel agent about it, why not let people talk directly to the people who were delivering that dream.
So www.chaletsdirect.com came into being – and somehow we always found it appropriate that the idea was born in a place which is at the heart of mountain sports, at the foot of Mont Blanc.
So nearly ten years later, whilst we have grown and expanded, weathered Internet booms and busts, the three founding members of Chalets Direct are still very much part of the company.
They are still exploring the mountains and getting a buzz from those blue sky days when they can.The ski dream is still the same – waking up on a fresh powder day, that first sharp intake of breath as you walk out of the lift with the world at your feet, the click of the bindings, the feel of the snow beneath your skis as you glide away and gravity starts to take hold. How can you beat that?
Why the Ski Blog?
Hopefully the Ski Blog will become a useful place for you to visit and to find out about skiing, snowboarding, summer holidays, things that are happening in the industry, and general advice on your holidays in the mountains.
It’s also our chance to discuss stuff which isn’t necessarily accommodation – so we can tell you about developments in Chalets Direct, and why we’re doing them.
We welcome your comments and feedback on posts, and if you have questions fire away. We would like to build a resource, so that people everywhere, from novice to expert, can tap into the experience and knowledge of other skiers or boarders.
If you would also like to be a guest blogger please contact us!
