Thank you Italy for letting us in when France wouldn't!

We were booked for our second family ski holiday to France and with the “fun and games” of Covid, 5 days before we were due to travel, France closed the border to Brits and our holiday was cancelled! With lots of umming and ahhing we finally decided to take the risk and travel to Italy instead albeit with pre-travel testing at the airport the day before.

So, we rebooked our holiday, booked our Covid tests for a drive-thru at the airport the night before and kept our fingers crossed that we didn’t unknowingly have the lurgy!

A few days later, negative Covid tests in hand, we were on our way.

The hotel we stayed at - Grand Hotel Paradiso - did say it was ski-in/ski-out but I definitely wouldn’t class it as that – we had a short walk up a snowy hill to get onto a flat area of snow but close enough! The rooms were a nice size and the restaurant and food choice were excellent. Our only gripe was the opening time of the restaurant which was a little later for all of us after a long day outside! The hotel had an indoor swimming pool, which between skiing, the kids made the most of!

The resort was Passo Tonale, Italy. It’s a much smaller resort than the one we had last stayed at but as it was the children’s second week and considering the circumstances we were just glad to be back in the mountains. Going at Christmas is early in the season but enough slopes were kept topped up by the snow cannons to give us plenty of skiing all week. I think going forward we do need a bigger resort but we loved the village and being in Italy.

We took the lift right to the top at 3000m (on foot as the slopes down were a bit ambitious for all of us!) and the views from there were spectacular. Another thing to note on the resort is because of the direction of the slopes in the valley, most of the slopes are in shade for a lot of the day. Overall, I’d say this is a great resort for beginners but I don’t think it’s one for us to return to.