Summit of Serenity

Why Stay in Alps exists

Picking a hotel in the Alps is harder than it looks. The same valley can hold a family guesthouse, a converted farmhouse and a palace hotel with a Guerlain spa, and a booking platform will show them side by side as if the only difference were the price per night. It won't tell you that one sits ten minutes from the lifts and the other needs a car, that the view everyone photographs belongs to the north-facing rooms only, or that the resort empties out in November. Those are the details that decide whether a stay works — and they are exactly the ones missing from a listings page.

Stay in Alps is an editorial team that spends its time on that gap. We cover the alpine arc across France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany and Slovenia: ski resorts and lake shores, valley towns and high-altitude hideaways, from simple chalets to the belle époque palace hotels of St. Moritz, Courchevel, Gstaad, Megève, Zermatt and Bad Gastein.

What we look at is always the same set of things, whatever the price bracket: where the hotel actually stands in the resort, what the rooms and suites are like and which ones are worth the extra, whether the spa is a real destination or a small wellness room, what the food is worth, and how the price per night moves between the ski season, the summer and the shoulder weeks. A luxury hotel and a village guesthouse get read against the same questions.

Who we write for

For the traveller who has already chosen the Alps and now has to choose where in the Alps. That person is usually comparing areas before comparing addresses — Val d'Isère or Courchevel, the Dolomites or the Bernese Oberland, a ski-in ski-out room or a village with something to do when it rains. So that is how we organise everything: by place first, then by the kind of trip you are taking.

Where to start

Each country has its own entry point, and each one leads down to individual resorts, valleys and lakes:

• Alpine hotels in Switzerland — the Bernese Oberland, Valais, the Engadin and the lakes
• Hotels in the French Alps — Savoie, Haute-Savoie and the southern massifs
• Hotels in the Italian Alps — South Tyrol, Trentino, the Dolomites and the northern lakes
• Hotels in the German Alps — Bavaria, from Garmisch to Berchtesgaden
• Alpine hotels in Slovenia — the Julian Alps, Bled and Bohinj

How we work

Every selection starts from the place, not from the hotel. We map what a destination is actually like — which areas are walkable, where the lifts are, what the season does to prices and crowds — and only then look at where to sleep. A hotel earns its place in a selection when it does something specific well: the position, the view, the spa, the food, the room type worth asking for. When an address suits one kind of traveller and not another, we say which.

We are funded by affiliate partnerships with booking platforms, which means we may earn a commission when a reader books through a link on the site. That model pays for the editorial work, and it is the reason our methodology page sets out our selection criteria in the open — how addresses are chosen, in what order they are presented, and how a reader can flag something we have got wrong. If you want to know who is behind the site, the about page covers that.

Mountains change. Lifts get rebuilt, hotels change hands, a valley that was quiet becomes busy. We revisit and update rather than publish and forget, and we date what we write so you can see how fresh it is.