Kandersteg

Atmosphere and nordic skiing carry the praise: a traditional village with a century of winter tourism behind it, very calm and full of restaurants. The cross-country network runs to tens of kilometres and includes a floodlit evening loop. On the alpine side Oeschinen is liked for wide, open slopes with good visibility and a long top-to-bottom run, part of it covered by snowmaking. Trains make day trips to Zermatt or Grindelwald easy.

The criticism is that there is barely any skiing: a few short blues and one red with variants, which an average skier exhausts in a couple of hours. The lifts are old and slow, the village is a 15-minute walk from the gondola, and ticket queues build at Oeschinen. Prices look high next to the big resorts nearby, and the Lauchernalp pass is bought separately. The drag lift on the Sunnbuel plateau has been dismantled, closing the second alpine sector.