Tignes. Skiing from October on the glacier, with the climb to your chalet planned before you land.

Tignes is strung along a single mountain road in the Haute Tarentaise. Val Claret is the highest and the most purpose built, sitting under the funicular to the glacier with a great deal of ski-in accommodation. Tignes le Lac, on the lake a few minutes below, is the centre of the resort and where most of the shops and the better chalets are. Le Lavachet is quieter and lower again, a short walk from Le Lac. Further down the road, Tignes 1800 at Les Boisses was rebuilt in the last fifteen years, and Les Brévières at the bottom is the one village here that still looks like an old Savoyard hamlet.

The distances between them are small but the altitude difference is not, and in a snowstorm the lower villages are sometimes easier to reach than the top. What matters for a transfer is that you tell us the village and the chalet, not simply Tignes. Fifteen or twenty minutes of climbing separates Les Brévières from Val Claret in good conditions, and considerably more when the ploughs are working.

Whichever airport you fly into, the road to Tignes ends the same way: down the Tarentaise through Albertville and Moûtiers to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, then a climb of about thirty kilometres past the dam and the Chevril lake to the resort. Val d'Isère traffic uses the same road as far as the junction above Tignes, so on changeover Saturday two large resorts are emptying and filling through one valley at once. That is the single biggest reason a transfer that should take two hours takes four.

There is no airfield in the resort, so the alternative to the drive is a helicopter from the valley, subject to daylight and visibility, landing at the resort's helipad. It is worth having on the table for a late arrival at Chambéry or a heavy snow day, and it is worth agreeing before the trip rather than on the day, because capacity in the Tarentaise disappears in exactly the weeks everyone wants it. See helicopter charter.