The Ultimate Ski Chalets

Globally, there's just a handful of specialist operators who look after their guests on this giddy level. London-based Consensio is the leader of the pack. 

Transcript

Peter Welcome to our travel podcast. We're specialist travel writers, and we've spent half a lifetime exploring every corner of the world.

Felice So we want to share with you some of our extraordinary experiences and the amazing people we've met along the way.

Peter This week we're in Courchevel, the smart French resort that ticks all the boxes for a truly luxurious ski holiday, and we're taking a look at the very top end of this. If you can't afford it, you can at least daydream about staying in one of the world's finest chalets where your every whim will be catered for.

Globally, there's just a handful of specialist chalet operators who look after their guests on this giddy level. London-based Consensio is the leader of the pack. France's largest premiere resort is divided into four quite separate villages, five if you include lower-level La Tania, all set at different altitudes.

Each has its own pedigree and until quite recently, Courchevel 1850 was the one synonymous with the ultimate opulence and the expense that inevitably accompanies it. This was where you'd find the Russian oligarchs who used to put no price cap at all on their ski holidays or on what they'd eat or buy. It's a place where a bowl of spag bol can cost €60 and a bottle of claret, something like €14,000.

But surprisingly, today I'm visiting a chalet in a marginally lower village, one which I personally much prefer. It's also got the best of the skiing, a fact that perhaps explains why Courchevel’s wealthiest clientele is on the move to pastures new.

I met up with Mischa Burns, who is the operations manager of Consensio. So here we are, Mischa, in Chalet Bacchus in what is now called Courchevel Moriond, but used to be called Courchevel. 1650, the second village, if you like, of Courchevel. Now, this chalet was built when?

Mischa The chalet was started in 2019, but then took several years to finish the product for obvious reasons. We took it on for the first winter last year, so since it was finished essentially...2122.

Peter Show me around it?

Mischa So we are currently in at the top of the chalet in the master bedroom with the beautiful views out over the mountain.

Peter And the sun has just come out after a big storm, so it looks absolutely magnificent out there. The main lift out of Courchevel 1650 is just a short push on skis away. It really is a very, very convenient position, right on the edge of the piste.

Mischa We have dark wood, a very designer chandelier...meant to look like a snowflake, which is appropriate for a ski chalet. We have very interesting side table lamps, if you've noticed.

Peter Oh yes, those are spectacular; they're ducks’ feet, golden ducks.

Mischa Golden ducks with feathers above them. Very interesting. Never seen those anywhere else before.

Peter And the bathroom here?

Mischa Again, all done by the designer; so made to measure and the owners decided where they want everything. They've tried to continue with the snowflake theme, in some ways, with the lights in here as well. Double sink and bath and shower, which most bedrooms do have, and really quite spacious.

Peter So now we've come down one storey, so to speak, one floor.

Mischa Yes. So now we're on the main living area level where we have a huge bespoke dining table.

Peter And then there's a remarkable view from here, too, because you're seeing out across the trees, which are looking pretty spectacular.

Mischa On this side you can see right down the valley on a clear day, to all of the mountains on the opposite side. Out the other side, you can see up to 1850 and out onto the slopes.

Peter Then there's a stupendous circular relaxation area where you could happily seat all 14 chalet guests and a handful of visitors as well. It's enormous. Let's go on downstairs, shall we? Five levels in all. And there's a lift, obviously.

Mischa Indeed.

Peter With modern art on the walls.

Mischa On the next level sown here, we have the massage room to one side. We have the boot room, which leads out onto the piste next to that, and then we have a couple more bedrooms on this level as well.

Peter And some other magnificent paintings too.

Mischa Indeed. Now we're down to the bottom entrance hall level, which also holds a large spa, the swimming-pool, Jacuzzi, hammam and sauna. And also the cinema room down here.

Peter Wow, that's pretty spectacular. It's huge. Wonderful, comfortable seats. You could settle down here for the evening with your friends and have your own private Hollywood. And then a long, thin pool, the sort of pool where you can do lengths, but you can also relax and splash around. Basically, if I had the money, my kind of chalet. So Mischa, you're the operations director of Consensio and you've been here since the beginning, I think, haven't you?

Mischa Since the day Ceri started it, yes, since September 2009.

Peter And you've grown from just one chalet then to goodness knows how many now?

Mischa Yes, we had four or five chalets in the first year and then we now have nine chalets and six apartments. But it has gone up and down over the years and we've added in the self-catering selection as well.

Peter The demand for this high-end of chalet is really quite enormous now, isn't it?

Mischa Yes, it actually has grown, I would say, over the years as opposed to decreased. And as well as that, we saw that there was a slight demand for something else as well, which is why we started the Relaxed product a couple of years ago.

So Relaxed product is essentially a smaller version of an ultimate chalet. So you know, with nice facilities that people want still with the free champagne, with the free wine, but the service is just more relaxed. So it's family-style dinners, two or three courses instead of five or six courses for dinner, a cake for afternoon tea instead of a huge spread. So just a little bit more relaxed, which some people prefer.

Peter Can you explain what a Consensio chalet holiday really means?

Mischa Yes, I can. It's very different to a hotel. So a chalet holiday means that you have your own dedicated house and staff and vehicle and chauffeur who are there to serve you for the whole of your holiday. You can choose the different foods you want, so there's not a menu to choose off where you're forced to choose something perhaps you don't want. You can dictate what you eat, you can dictate what you drink. You can decide exactly how your holiday is going to go and what you'd like to do during it. And all of that is facilitated by your dedicated team of chalet staff. So very, very different to a hotel holiday.

Peter And of course, even in the best of five-star, or as they say sometimes these days, six-star hotel you cannot it's impossible to cater for on the level that you can because you're only dealing with up to, say, 14, 16 people at the very most, sometimes a lot less, and you can't do that – you can't produce that standard of service in a hotel under any circumstances.

Mischa No, I think it would be very difficult in a hotel. Whereas we, on the other hand, quite often we have guests who will have asked for fillet steak for dinner, but then they may have decided to have it at lunchtime on the slopes and they will come back at 5:00 in the afternoon and say to us, ‘Oh no, we had that for lunch; we've changed our minds. We now would like lamb for dinner’. Actually you can do that for 14 people. The chef can run out to the butcher and make sure that that happens. So it's a really bespoke service, much more so than a hotel, I would say.

Peter I imagine you can get some pretty bizarre requests?

Mischa We do. I was thinking about this yesterday. We had a lady a few weeks ago who is allergic to colour. She doesn't like colour around her in the chalet. So in order for her to be able to come on holiday with us, we had to tone everything down in the chalet. So we had to remove any throws or bright coloured pictures and replace them with other things. We had to make sure the curtains were all to her liking. Yes, it's difficult in some places, as you can imagine, but essentially we had to go over the entire chalet, remove all the colour and replace it with beiges, beiges and greys basically is what she wanted. Even the flowers.

Peter I've heard a lot of allergies, but that's a new one on me.

Mischa I'm not sure it's a genuine allergy, just a dislike. However, the thing is, it's a bespoke holiday so we can do that.

Peter And you do can Middle Eastern cuisine or whatever? You can do that?

Mischa Yes, absolutely. You can request any kind of cuisine you would like. A few of our chefs are French, a few are other nationalities, so there's a real mixture around anyway. And yes, essentially anything that you want to do, they will be of a standard where they can produce whatever is requested.

Peter While Consensio is based in England and based in London, staff are by no means necessarily English, are they?

Mischa No, not at all. Since Brexit, obviously, we've had to change the way we recruit and the way we do all of that kind of thing. So now we recruit all over Europe and we have a completely multinational group of staff now. The chalet that you're in is a perfect example. We have Irish, South African, New Zealand with an Irish passport, Polish, French. I think that's it.

Peter Marcin, you're the chalet manager. Where do you come from?

Marcin I come from Poland.

Peter But you worked all over the world. Tell us a bit about where you've been?

Marcin I was working in the Canary Islands, in Balearic Islands, on the continent in Spain, in Italy, in Sardinia, in Sicily, in Finland, Norway, Iceland, Poland, Germany, and in the UK also.

Peter But this is your first time in the mountains?

Marcin Yes.

Peter First time on skis?

Marcin Yes. I started skiing here.

Peter And is that ok? Is it going all right?

Marcin I believe that's the best place to start skiing because there are the slopes for everyone. So I started very easy here in the front of the chalet, actually. Now I can really enjoy skiing, and the first day I was really afraid of going out.

Peter So this is your new chalet in Courchevel? It's called Bacchus. It's certainly very comfortable in every possible way.

Mischa This has become one of my favourites. I did some of the testing here at the start of the season and got to try out all of the facilities. And I have to say it's really wonderful. One of my favourite things is the Jacuzzi on the front balcony, just on the slopes there, where you can sit with a glass of Champagne and watch the skiers go by or watch your children playing outside. There isn't another chalet that I can think of that has that in our group. So yes, I think it's got lovely facilities; it's in a perfect location on the slopes close to the restaurants and close to all the shops if you want to walk in. Couldn't ask for more really.

Peter And it's in Courchevel Moriond, which used to be called Courchevel 1650 and I still know it as that. It used to be the second Courchevel because 1850 is the one with the big name where the Russians stay, etc. But in recent years, 1650 has become perhaps the heart of Courchevel, in lots of ways.

Mischa I think that's probably right. People have moved down the hill essentially, from booking a chalet in 1850. There are now plenty of Russian and Middle Eastern families who all now book in 1650 instead because you get so much more for your money and you just have the same facilities and you're still right on the piste. So you have everything at less of a cost. I think it can be a lot quieter in 1650 and it's also such a nice, easy going ski area – big, wide, blue pistes.

Peter So Marcin, Courchevel is a very cosmopolitan resort with skiers arriving from all over the world. Has that been reflected in your clients this winter?

Marcin Well, actually, we had some guests from United Kingdom. We had some guests from South America, actually. We had guests from Middle East, from Dubai, from Kuwait.

Mischa Yes, we're seeing more and more Middle East guests now, actually, interestingly, taking over from the Russians.

Peter Because the Russians...Courchevel has always been known for the Russians, but of course, for obvious reasons, they're not here now, are they?

Mischa No.

Peter Even those who are domiciled in Europe, they don't want to be seen to be spending their money or are keeping a very low profile.

Mischa The Russian clientele has gone down very much. And certainly in the 13 years that we've been going, it's gone from 45% of our clientele to probably 5% now.

Peter Really? As little as that? Because overall people always say, of course it was full of Russians. But I think the reality is, is that it was probably 10% of visitors were from Russia, but they accounted for perhaps 50% of the spend of the income of the resort. And that's a huge sum. So when they go, you're left in trouble. So where do the replacements come from?

Mischa I do think Middle East, certainly. I think that that has increased by a huge amount. We rather expected possibly for it to come from China, but so far, I don't know that it has. We've had maybe one set of Chinese visitors in all these years.

Peter You're not alone in saying that. Everyone's saying they expect the Chinese to be here, but they're not. What about India?

Misha Indian guests? Maybe one a year, if that, for us. So I'm not sure it's there either. I think it's probably Middle East, all the different Middle Eastern countries.

Peter And South America?

Misha And South America, a few more Australians as well now they're allowed to travel again and Americans, more Americans this year than we've had before, I think, which is interesting when they can obviously ski much more close to home.

Peter Yes. But actually, a lot of Americans tell me that it's actually cheaper to come here. If you live in New York City, for example...I run some courses at the beginning of the season, which I do in Val d’Isere, and we have every year people who come from New York City in Thanksgiving time in America and end of November, late November. They come here for a week rather than go to the Rockies. They get on a plane from the airport in New York, one of the airports, you go to Geneva and you drive up to Val d'Isere and it takes about the same time to get to Aspen. The prices are a lot cheaper.

Mischa And we do have large enough ski areas here.

Peter Our ski areas in Europe are actually larger than everything in America. We have much, much bigger ski areas. It's about the only thing we have bigger, but we do have bigger ski areas. So what about the future? Where will you go from here? More chalets?

Mischa Yes, we would like some more chalets, more Ultimate chalets, a few more Relaxed chalets and more serviced or self-catered properties as well.

Peter I wanted to talk about those because we haven't actually touched on that. So you started a few years ago having apartments. Explain how that works in terms of staffing?

Misha So in terms of staffing, the serviced apartments or self-catered apartments essentially are sold as an apartment where there are no staff other than services for cleaning, which happens on a daily basis, and then we add extra services on. So for example, people are asked if they would like to book a bread and croissant basket in the morning, or delivery in the morning, if they would like shopping done. Really they're asked if they want any extra services, but cleaning and shopping and that kind of thing.

Peter They get dinner on demand if they want it?

Misha We do offer, for example, there are services in most resorts that will offer a takeaway these days.

Peter So pretty sophisticated takeaways?

Mischa Yes, exactly. So most restaurants will do a takeaway if they want one. So we could go and collect that and deliver it to them, for a fee of course. So yes, essentially they can ask for whatever extra services they would like. We book massages for them, we book mountain restaurants for them, we act as a sort of concierge once they get here.

Peter And the concierge is part of Consensio, it is an important one, isn't it?

Mischa Yes, very important. We try to help them organise everything that they would possibly need for a holiday before they arrive, whether they are just in a service department or in an Ultimate chalet.

Peter But you won't book a flight for them?

Mischa No. Other than flights, but everything else we will help them. Transfers, ski lessons, ski hire, massages, restaurants, quite literally anything. And then once they're here, they also have requests as well. In fact, one from your chalet springs to mind recently. It was international..was it Valentine's Day or Women's Day that you had to get the large bouquet of flowers?

Marcin That was Valentine's Day.

Mischa Yes. So we had some guests in this particular chalet on Valentine's Day. And I think the gentleman had possibly forgotten it was Valentine's Day. So at 10pm at night, he asked Marcin, the chalet manager, if he could...well, he gave him €1,000 and said, I want €1,000 of roses ready for 8am tomorrow morning.

Peter At 10:00 at night? That's tough. In a ski resort, it's impossible.

Mischa You did it, though, didn't you?

Mischa It is possible.

Peter What did you do?

Mischa Actually, I have some connections at the flower shop in 1850, and I had it in the middle of the night for a big bouquet of the roses in the garage.

Peter It's lucky they had the roses here.

Mischa Yes.

Peter That's pretty amazing. So there they were in the morning when he came down?

Marcin Exactly.

Mischa And it's partially because these guys have good relationships with the suppliers here.

Peter Well, that's what you've got to do, because, I mean, to be a chalet manager, it's not just looking after the chalet, is it? It's knowing the people in the resort.

Mischa To be able to get you into a restaurant.

Marcin Exactly. That's really important.

Peter And obviously, things like getting a booking in one of the most popular Michelin-starred restaurants, I can't get them, but you can, hopefully. That's terrific.

Mischa Yes, indeed. So we do try and keep all of those relationships going throughout the season. They are hugely important. We had a Saudi couple, just two people come and stay in Chalet Le Rochet, which is huge, as you know, on their own. And they were a little bit bored, they didn't ski much, they didn't know what to do with themselves for the week. So the chef very kindly asked them if they would like cooking lessons. So our Saudi couple ended up having cooking lessons with the chef every day for the entire week. That's what they wanted to do whilst they were here in a ski resort.

Then we had Irish dancing for Saint Patrick's Day in another chalet. We happen to have an Irish chalet host who was a champion Irish dancer. And once we found this out, it's been very useful ever since. And we thought for Saint Patrick's Day, it was the perfect time for her to get out there and do some Irish dancing, and the guests absolutely loved it.

Peter So you can do almost anything?

Mischa We can, it would seem, yes. We just keep discovering these talents of our staff and putting them to good use. We had some guests who didn't speak very good English and they demanded to have blue chickens...on their manifest. We couldn't think what on earth blue chickens were. They meant Bresse chickens, I think they're called Bresse Bleu, maybe.

We eventually figured this out with a bit of a bit of communication with them, but it was rather funny for a while when we got a manifest with blue chickens, guests would like blue chickens for dinner. It took us a rather a long time to figure out what that was, but we did, in time and managed to get them all the way from Bresse.

Mischa Have you got any more stories Marcin from this year, from in here?

Marcin I had a very nice group actually from Dubai, and the guests saw the snow for the first time in their life. So in the evening they asked if they can go sledging in the front of the chalet. And it was a really nice evening for them because there was sledging for two, three hours. And I was just serving them the hot chocolate and some shots of Genepi on the slope. That was a really amazing thing to see on the slopes.

Mischa Yes, a nice experience for them if it was their first time seeing snow.

Peter So quite a lot of the guests don't actually ski, is that fair?

Marcin I will say like 80% are like skiers and they spend all the time on the slopes. But there's always, I would say, around this 20% that will stay in the chalet or will ask for some different activities.

Mischa I think we maybe get more skiers here in the chalet on the piste than perhaps we do in some other chalets. I would say it might be 60/40 in some other chalets.

Peter Because you're not near...I'm sure you've got a chauffeur that takes you there, but you're not near any smart shopping here, are you? You've got to go to 1850.

Mischa Exactly. It's only, what...10, 12 minute drive away? But that's only a few miles.

Peter It's not just down the road. Do they come with lots of luggage? I've heard wonderful stories, people bringing their own sheets or whatever. – anything like that?

Mischa There are sometimes extra vehicles for the luggage. We've had a few of those. You will have a family that comes with 20 large suitcases, but it's almost par for the course these days. You expect it, so it doesn't seem a big deal.

In Shemshak, up in Courchevel 1850, we had some Russian guests who used to come every year actually. Not only did they leave all of their luggage behind, but they also left the things that they bought in the designer shops and things like that. I suppose thinking at some point they'd come back for it or we would send it on. We were left years later with things from Chanel and which are still probably in our storage somewhere waiting for him to come back. So yes, it did happen a bit more in the past that one. More with the Russians, I would say that.

Peter And then, of course, special requests for alcohol, different wines and things like that?

Mischa Yes, all of that's fairly easily doable up here. There's lots of good wine shops in Val d'Isere and in Courchevel that you can order things from. There's almost nothing we can't get, I would say it would have to be fairly rare and come from a long way away that we wouldn't be able to get it.

Peter So what's the ratio of staff here?

Mischa So here we have six and a half, seven full time. So about seven staff here, which seems a lot for 14 people. It’s a good ratio.

Peter What do they all do?

Marcin I will say always a lot of things to do for all of the staff. So we have a chef and we are very lucky because the chef is from here, so he knows the local cuisine, local food, and he is really, really good. We have three hosts, we have a chauffeur, we have a restaurant assistant and myself, and with 14 guests that we have during the day, I will always find something to do for all of the staff here.

Mischa Especially if you have non-skiers in a group.

Peter Yes, indeed.

Mischa And there's people always in the chalet wanting to use the facilities or eat or drink.

Marcin And especially because we have the spa area and we have a bar, so I always want to have at least one person in the chalet. So if the guest would like to have some cocktail or would like to go to the Jacuzzi, there's always someone who can help to arrange it.

Peter Someone will be on hand to do it?

Marcin That's true.

Mischa When you have a bar up here and a bar downstairs and the cinema room where they'd like drinks and popcorn delivered, there's quite a lot of running around to do.

Marcin Exactly.

Mischa They're always busy. It was our very first season that we had a lady, I think she was probably Russian, come with her little dog. It was a chihuahua or a poodle or something like that. And it only ate rare fillet steak and organic chicken breast, which is fine. I mean, we get those kind of requests, no problem at all. The chef had to cook it in a certain way and she would check it before the dog ate it every day. So it had to be perfectly cooked or it was sent back. I'm not sure the dog would have objected, but she did. That's a bit rarer these days, I would say, isn't it?

Peter Presumably these days, you don't get many people are travelling with their pets?

Mischa Well, about half of the chalets allow dogs. So almost every week I'd say there's a pet. Almost every week there's a pet somewhere, and it's often the staff who end up walking it, feeding it.

Peter So what's changed now for Consensio after COVID?

Mischa In the first year after COVID, we had to change all sorts of ways that we did things and have contingencies for...if members of staff got COVID. That first year after COVID was really, really difficult in the weeks that we ran, because if people dropped with COVID, you still had to isolate for ten days and it meant that everyone was out of the chalet. So that was that was a real challenge, even last winter because they still had the ten-day isolation thing in place for winter 21/22.

Mischa And that meant that in Christmas week last year, for example, I remember Chalet Lhotse in Val d'Isere on Christmas Day had two staff out of the six left because they'd all dropped with COVID during the previous week. Guests were fantastically understanding about it, I have to say last year, when we had to give them this bad news that we'd have to get a takeaway for Christmas dinner. You can imagine that would ruin their holiday, but they were fine.

Peter And they literally had to do that?

Mischa You know, I didn't have a spare chef anywhere. We had no spare staff anyway last year because they were constantly dropping with COVID one after the other all over the place. This year has hopefully been much, much better. You don't have to isolate anymore. And you know, the rules that were in place then are not in place now, luckily. So we can actually function normally again, which we couldn't even up until last winter. One of the other things we've been thinking about, not necessarily due to COVID, but just in the last two years, has been our eco credentials and how we obviously need to do what we can as a company.

Peter So what are you doing?

Mischa  Well, so we took a power pledge. So for example, I've pledged that by 2026 we will have electric vehicles. So that's something I'm working on now. Very difficult, much more difficult than you would imagine to get electric 4x4 vehicles; they don't currently exist in large format. So that's something we're trying to work see whether VW will do, or maybe Mercedes or something like that. At the moment there is no solution to it, unfortunately. So it's something we need to work towards for the next three years. So it may be that we have to have hybrid to start with and then hope that one of these companies will make 4x4 large vehicles.

A lot of people are testing the electric vehicles this winter actually in the snow because there was some worry that the batteries wouldn't do so well in the cold. So we'll see how that goes, see what everyone reports back about that. But so that was part of our power pledge. I am currently encouraging all of our chalet owners to move to providers for electricity, for example, that don't have anything to do with fossil fuels. France is quite good anyway for that kind of thing, but there are still better providers out there generally for things like electricity that you can move to the properly green suppliers. So slowly over time, we're trying to encourage people to do that.

We've changed how we work in the chalets as well, whereas before we used to give out bottles of mini bottles of Evian for everyone to take skiing with them, we have now changed to a small carton which is made of recycled cardboard and it's actually made of a recycled and recyclable cap as well in plastic, so it is closable. So it sort of mimics the bottles, but it has much better eco credentials essentially, and we can recycle it all instead of throwing it away, which is great. And that seems to be working. People are accepting this change, which is great as well because you have to be careful with the luxury product that you don't change it too much from people's perception of luxury.

Peter And what about toiletries and shampoos?

Mischa So we've changed those as well. So we are now with Occitane. We use the larger format now, refillable, larger format. So we're no longer giving out small plastic bottles. They're all the larger format which are reused and reused and reused and refilled, and they're all made from recycled plastic and are all recyclable as well. So essentially that's quite a large change from what we used to do. And again, guests seem very happy with this. I think everyone has, if anything, complimented products, haven't they, rather than been unhappy with them? So they all seem to like it very much as a product. That's great.

One of the products that we have, which traditionally, like with all companies, probably is ordered in bulk from China or somewhere like that, I would now like to buy in France...is slippers. There is one company who are doing bamboo slippers that look very interesting. And of course they're more expensive than anything you'll get from China, but I think it's probably worth our investing in something like this to help our eco credentials again and be a more sustainable product.

Peter I should point out that for obvious reasons, in a ski resort, outdoor shoes are forbidden in Consensio chalets ,as they are indeed in nearly all chalets.

Mischa Yes.

Peter So there you have it. Chalet Bacchus, the perfect chalet run by Consensio. If you want to know more about the chalet or indeed more about Consensio and the private exclusive chalets that they offer in the French Alps, go to Consensiochalets.co.uk

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Also see our episode, Chilled Out Luxury Ski Holidays.

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