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Skier & Snowboarder-Submitted Reviews for Samnaun
Total (3.1)
A ski resort's overall star rating displayed here is not calculated based on a simple average but takes several factors, including the age of a review, into account.
This resort is linked to Ischgl on the top of the mountain which give a great access from Austrian side. A person can park his/her car in Austria and go skiing in Switzerland. People are friendly and very helpful. We had an amazing experience. Would go there again.
Sally Black
Samnaun is quite an unusual ski area. It's right up in the north East corner of Switzerland on the Austrian border and the winding mountain road up to it seems to pass in to Austria as you reach it. I didn't realise before i arrived it is duty free and the first thing you pass is about 10 petrol stations as the petrol here costs about half what it does in Austria or down in the valley. Samnaun has three or four separate village bases strung along the road. The main village has most of the shops, bars and restaurants but it's in a narrow valley and you skui down a track by the rosad or get the ski bus to access the doubkle decker gondola up to the ski slopes. You can ski back in from above via the 'duty free' red run.
On the slopes the skiing is good fun with fast modern lifts but we had a couple of guys with us who hadn't skied in a few years and we realised nearly all the terrain is graded red/intermediate - a lot of it the kind of red that would be graded black in North Amerrica. There were a few blues, but really they ought to be reds too. The terrain is high which meant we had great skiing on December 1st, but it is a bit barren and windswept too, no trees. You can ski over the border in to Austria and down to Ischgl, which is a cool thing to be able to do. So it's great for intermediates but not so good for beginners I would guess.
Back in resort we found great restaurants that were very affordable despite the high quality and lots of duty free bargains - much better than airport duty free.
Great duty free shopping with some quite swanky shops, and some brilliant skiing linked with the Ischgl area - a particularly good long red down to Samnaun from Palinkopf with some spectacular views, although there is a bit of flat at the very end. The Schmuggler Alm in Samnaun Dorf (can also be reached by the Palinkopf run) is a great place for apres ski and food - its always lively and the atmosphere is great. Alp Rausch in Samnaun Compatsch is also atmospheric, and a great place to have a few drinks at the end of the day as its at the end of another great run down from Alp Trida. Whilst the apres ski is lively, its not so crazy as it is in Ischgl, where the drinking starts pretty early in the afternoon. The snow parks in the resort are brilliant - the speed gun at Idalp is great fun. You're unlikely to hear much English during your stay - particularly in Samnaun, which I believe makes the skiing even nicer. Luckily, most shop keepers etc speak pretty good English if your German's a bit basic. As the resort's pretty high, snow reliability isn't as much of an issue as it is in some other European resorts (even when we went mid April there were huge snowfalls), and piste grooming is also pretty good. The only thing I would say is that a lot of the skiing is above the tree line so it can get a bit bleak in bad weather - the skiing on the Ischgl side is lower and has more trees. Another small point is that you won't find any rustic small mountain huts serving grappa/gluhwein, but there are some good large modern mountain huts. Even with these small point, I would say that Samnaun is, all in all, a brilliant resort.
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