Courchevel. From Chambéry or the altiport to your chalet door, in whichever village it sits.

Courchevel is not one village but several, strung up a single mountainside in the Tarentaise and named for their altitude in metres. Le Praz sits lowest at 1300, an old Savoyard village with the ski jumps at its edge. Courchevel Village at 1550 is quieter and close to the trees. Moriond at 1650 faces the sun and has its own lift network into the Three Valleys. Courchevel 1850, at the top, is the one most people mean when they say Courchevel: the hotels, the Croisette, the gallery windows and the altiport above it.

The resort renamed all four in 2011, dropping the numbers in favour of Le Praz, Village, Moriond and simply Courchevel. Almost nobody outside the tourist office uses the new names, and your driver will not be confused either way. The commune markets six villages in all, adding Saint-Bon down in the valley and La Tania on the road across towards Méribel.

Which one you are staying in matters for one reason: the last climb is shared. Everything above Moûtiers uses the same road, so snow, an incident or a Saturday changeover affects all four villages at once, and a chalet at 1850 is roughly fifteen minutes further up than one at Le Praz.

Courchevel has its own airfield at 2,008 metres, a short, steeply sloping strip that aircraft land uphill and take off downhill. At 537 metres with a gradient of about 18.6 per cent and no go-around available, it is limited to small aircraft and helicopters flown by pilots holding the French mountain qualification or a site authorisation. Business jets cannot use it.

So the jet lands at Chambéry, Geneva, Lyon or Grenoble and the last leg is by road or by helicopter into the altiport: roughly fifteen to twenty minutes from Chambéry, thirty to thirty five from Geneva, in daylight and acceptable visibility. On a busy Saturday that is the difference between arriving before lunch and arriving in the dark, and helicopter capacity sells out for the same weeks everyone else wants.