Every year in February children from all over the UK have their much awaited half-term break and many families take this opportunity to go on holiday. One on the most popular destinations for half-term holidays is the mountains, whether that is Italy, Switzerland, France or Austria, half-term has always been considered the time to go skiing/snowboarding with your family, to introduce your kids to the sport, to meet up with old friends and relax and have fun in the snow. This year was no different, if anything it was even busier given the fact that the last two years many people weren’t able to travel for half-term. If you’re curious about where most lessons took place and how many hours of skiing were delivered during the past week then keep reading. 

Instructors on Maison Sport have been extremely busy and we are excited to say many of them had their week fully booked, in fact about 50% of the instructors had last week fully booked and this week is no different. All together the instructors on Maison Sport delivered a little under 1,000 lessons teaching a total of over 20,200 hours last week…that’s a lot of skiing! 

It was no surprise that the most popular destination for these February holidays was France, it has always been this way especially for UK travellers. Although everyone was ready to take the PCR or antigen tests needed to enter France, travellers were pleasantly surprised when on the 12th of February France announced that a pre-departure test was no longer needed to enter the country if you were fully vaccinated. This was enough to convince the last few people who were on the fence about travelling to pack their bags and try to find a last minute booking. Other popular countries were of course Italy, Austria, and Switzerland where we have many instructors, and a new destination this season has been Slovenia. We are constantly looking for new places to offer our services, as long as there are qualified instructors that want to teach, we’ll try to be there to offer you their lessons. Slovenia has been a new destination this season and quite a few lessons were delivered there even during this half-term week. It’s always exciting for us to add a new country to our platform and see it succeed, so we hope to see more instructors signing up and more of you travelling there for your ski holiday. 

Let’s dive a little deeper and talk about ski resorts, given that the most popular country was France, it’s expected that the ski resort where most lessons were delivered was in France too, do you have any idea which one it might be? By a difference of two lessons, the prize goes to Chamonix Mont-Blanc, followed closely by Courchevel. Of course being one of the largest ski areas in Europe, Chamonix has plenty of space to accommodate all of its visitors which is why it’s many people’s number one choice when it comes to their ski holiday. Those of you who travelled to Italy, travelled mostly to Cervinia Valtournenche and for people that crossed the border into Switzerland, their destination of choice was Zermatt. These are all very popular resorts for the February holidays, we’ll see at the end of the season if they are different from the end of season recap, but thankfully the season isn’t over just yet so you’ll have to wait a little longer to read that. 

Most of our customers preferred skiing as their discipline this February, 65% of the lessons taught were for skiing, 32% for snowboarding and the rest for the other disciplines we offer on the platform. We always say instructors aren’t just for beginners and it is shown in the fact that only 47% of the people who booked lessons were complete beginners, the rest were either intermediate or a group with mixed abilities. Booking a few hours with an instructor is not just about learning how to ski, many advanced skiers or snowboarders book an instructor just to get to know the resort better, or if they want to go off-piste one afternoon, then you definitely need a person who knows the territory well to do that. 

All in all we are very happy with how the February holidays have been going so far and we are extremely proud of all the instructors that have been teaching non-stop for the past 10 days, their efforts are clearly evident in the amazing reviews that have been left by customers. It just shows how much we were all itching to get back on the slopes. The season might have started a little slowly but now that everything is open and it’s so easy to travel back and forth we’re sure it’s going to remain just as busy until the last day ski resorts are open! The next really busy period on our calendars will be Easter and once again the instructors are getting booked up pretty fast so if you’re planning on going skiing, we suggest you start booking now if you haven’t done so already.

The Independent Instructors on Maison Sport are Waiting for You!