Igloo hotels: hot winter trend offers skiers no-frills luxury in the Alps
- Thousands of people every winter pay upwards of US$500 a night to stay in a hotel carved from piles of snow and ice in ski resorts
- Beds are carved from blocks of ice and topped with fur throws, a padded mattress, expedition-strength sleeping bags and comfy pillows.
It sounds like a tough sell: a hotel room with no windows, no heat, and no bathroom, all for the price of five-star accommodation. And yet, thousands of people a year jump at the chance, paying upwards of US$500 a night to stay in igloo hotels carved from piles of snow and ice atop ski areas across the Alps.
Over New Year’s, I stumbled onto the igloo hotel near Gstaad in Switzerland, where it sits at 1,950 metres (6,400 feet), just below the summit station of the Saanersloch gondola. There’s an outdoor bar with views across the surrounding peaks for skiers passing by, and inside there’s a restaurant where the ice casts a soothing blue glow, and the wooden tables are set into booths carved from the snow.
The five ski-in-ski-out “Igloo Villages” (Iglu-Dorf in German) are similar to the various ice hotels built every winter in Scandinavia, but they’re far more accessible in resorts such as Davos and Zermatt.
Over about three or four weeks every autumn, snow is piled on top of massive balloons to create the basic structure of the igloos. Once the snow has settled, the balloons are deflated and workers go in with chainsaws, shovels, and carving tools to shape the rooms and built-in furniture such as beds and benches.
Later, artists carve ice sculptures, with each hotel featuring a different theme such as ancient Rome, Nordic mythology, James Bond, or sea creatures.
Each of the Gstaad hotel’s 11 rooms is its own smaller igloo, linked by a snowpack hallway to the restaurant, a sauna, and an outdoor hot tub. For most of the rooms, bathrooms are in a shared wooden structure at the end of the hallway. Three rooms have private baths, one with its own hot tub.