It's been a while since a review of Champéry was posted to this website so here's my experience after having just come back from a week's skiing there.

There were 10 of us (all 30-something lads) staying in Chalet Barnard on the Route des Rumières on the northern edge of the village. The chalet was of a good standard with decent-sized bedrooms, an outdoor hot tub, a TV room with X-Box on the ground floor and a large flatscreen TV & DVD player in the main lounge on the first floor. It was only a 6-7 min walk down to the village centre and a 10-15 min walk down to the Champéry Télépherique cable car, although it's quite a steep walk back uphill to the chalet! Thankfully, our chalet operator provided minibus lifts to and from the cable car station.

The village itself is a beautiful, picture-postcard Swiss Alpine village, with traditional wooden chalets that look even better in person than they do in the photographs. We mainly stayed in our chalet in the evenings as a 3-course dinner with wine was provided, although we did spend an afternoon in Mitchell's watching the football and even though it's quite pricey (CHF 8.50 for a pint of Kronenboug 1664) the bar staff are really friendly so we went back on a Friday night when the atmosphere was great. We also went to Champéry's main nightclub, La Crevasse, on the Friday night, which is your typical ski resort nightclub: small and hot with questionable music and extortionate prices (CHF 36 for 3 vodka & cokes).

Access to the massive Portes du Soleil ski area is via the Champéry Télépherique cable car, which only takes about 5-6 minutes to whisk you all the way up to the Planachaux at 2000m, ears popping all the way! There had been a 20-30cm dump of snow in the PdS a week before we arrived (in an otherwise relatively poor snow season) so most of the pistes were in reasonably good condition, although there were large patches of bare ground in places. We had a glorious week of warm spring sunshine, which tended to make the south-facing slopes rather slushy by the afternoon and skiing back to Les Crosets from the Pointe de Mossette was heavy going, especially at the end of a long day’s skiing. However, as long as we stayed on the higher pistes around Le Fornet, Avoriaz and Arare, the skiing was good.

All in all, I would thoroughly recommend staying in Champéry if you plan to ski the Portes du Soleil. However, the main drawback I found was the fact that because the village lies on the far eastern edge of the ski area, it is a bit of a trek to try to explore the whole PdS. Perhaps staying somewhere more central, such as Avoriaz or Morzine, would make it easier to explore more of the PdS ski area.