Crystal Ski www.crystalski.co.uk

We’ve been on 4 holidays with Tui (who own Crystal Ski) in the past 5 years and on every single one there’s been a more than 2 hour delay to either a flight or a transfer, but this last holiday (and it will be our last ever with Tui after our experience) was by far the worst.

The journey to our hotel was relatively uneventful. The flight was on time for once and our transfer was waiting, but they forgot to give us our welcome packs, including our equipment hire vouchers and lift passes, on the coach. That meant we had to wait around for a rep the following morning who we were told would turn up before 8am but didn’t get to us until 8:30.

Our next interaction with Crystal Ski was that evening when the rep came to our hotel. We had a couple of basic broad questions to ask about piste conditions and good places to eat, but the very vacant rep, who claimed she had been here for a month and knew everything about the resort, said she “didn’t really know” about what the pistes were like and could only tell us about places to eat based on a few rumours she’d heard. From the glazed look on her face I expect if we’d asked her about the clubs open at 2am we’d have got a more helpful answer.

But the thing that put us off ever booking with Crystal Ski or Tui again was the journey home. After 45 minutes of waiting for our transfer outside we got a message to say the coach couldn’t pick us up because it didn’t have enough luggage space! Bearing in mind that Crystal Ski knew exactly which passengers were travelling and how much luggage they had booked on the plane, it seems like very basic logistics to arrange a coach or coaches with enough space, but Crystal Ski couldn’t manage this either. The message said they were trying to arrange alternative transport and would make contact again later. They eventually made contact to say another coach was being sent but wouldn’t be with us until 1hr and 35mins after our original transfer time. They claimed not a single taxi in resort was available sooner but offered us £25 each in compensation for the delay and promised we would miss our flight…

Finally, 1hr and 55mins after our original transfer time the coach arrived and the driver was a star, driving like he was on mission to get us to the airport as quickly as possible. However whilst on the coach I got a call from the Crystal Ski rep at the airport asking me where we were and to check on my phone mapping app when we’d be arriving (why was I now responsible for their logistics??). I told them my predicted time and he said he’d ask the flight team to wait for us. The next information I got was a text to say that our taxi from Manchester airport to Birmingham airport (where we were supposed to be flying to) had been booked for 10pm! What a great way to discover we weren’t going to be on our flight! The airport rep then phoned back to say we’d miss our flight (despite multiple promises we wouldn’t) and they were booking us on the plane to Manchester. When I asked if they were going to cover the extra parking charges we would incur at Birmingham (roughly £50-60) they said they would and would likely offer us more than that for the inconvenience we’d suffered. This was reiterated at the airport when the rep said he would arrange a further £100 compensation in addition to the £25 per person we’d accepted earlier.

Eventually we got home, several hours later than planned and via Manchester, and awaited our compensation but it never arrived. I have emailed Crystal Ski and had no response. So a truly poor showing from them and absolutely no communication or compensation. They even asked us to write a review and I was more than happy to accept!

Holiday of a Lifetime Ruined by Crystal Ski Holidays

We booked what we believed would be a dream holiday to celebrate our son’s 18th birthday—an all-inclusive ski trip to Avoriaz, France, from 21st to 28th December 2024. This trip cost nearly £20,000, involved 10 people across two bookings, and was meant to be a memorable experience. Instead, Crystal Ski Holidays delivered a nightmare of disorganization and incompetence that ruined our son’s birthday, Christmas, and the entire trip.

Outbound Journey – A Disgrace

Hotel Check-In – Chaos

Ski School Debacle

Handling of Illness – Neglectful and Unacceptable

Christmas Dinner – A New Low

Inbound Journey – More Incompetence

Crystal Ski’s Response – Insulting

Crystal Ski Holidays failed us at every turn. Their incompetence ruined what should have been a holiday of a lifetime. Never again.

May as well have no customer service as all they do is say T&C’s and send generic responses.

Take part of your holiday don't get the meals you have paid for (half board) tell you to complain when you get back from holiday only to get exactly the same response as before the holiday.. in a word RUBBISH!!

Dont book TUI.

Would never book with this company again

Lost my suitcase for 5 days and don’t take responsibility for it customer service and managers are absolutely abysmal

Competitive price.

Polite reps and hotel staff.

Our first choice of hotel was unavailable despite having paid in full - an email informing us of this arrived a few weeks later. Apparently the hotel was at fault for this. There was only one other hotel at a comparable cost - in fact, the second one was priced a bit higher so we assumed we had done well out of it. The hotel had the same Crystal rating as the first one. On arrival it was clear that the first hotel had a 4* rating; ours had a 2* rating. This should have been made really clear when we were sorting out the issue over the phone and agreeing the new holiday details.

On arrival at the airport we were not happy to be told we would have to wait for another incoming flight to fill up the coach before we could depart. As we were kept waiting for over an hour, the ski rental shop had closed 20-25 minutes before we arrived at resort. That was obviously annoying, especially as we were not informed before. It’s possible that we would have booked a private transfer had we known earlier.

We will not travel with Crystal again as our confidence built up over the last few years has gone.

Hang up the phones when you have a problem, refuse to help, don’t reply to emails, their competitors are offering solutions and changing holidays when skiing can’t be fulfilled, Crystal ski are forcing people to go and hiking their prices!!

The new Crystal website is awful - impossible to search for a particular hotel in a resort.

Unworkable unless you want to scroll through scores or even hundreds of options to find your preference.

After many years of travelling with Crystal I've now moved to Inghams for all our skiing holidays.

A family of 4, children 3 and 5yrs old. The resort is good for beginners and second timers and children. More advanced skiing is limited. We stayed at Delle Alpi which was great provided you got used to its lay out. The lifts in the hotel go to different floors so need to get head around that. Old part is fine but the newer part is really nice. Wellness suite was fantastic with such views, and kiddie friendly with time limits. Also the complementary kiddie club was great for us. Ours preferred it to skiing! Ski school is in middle of village and the hotel is at one end. Use the bus.....which we didn't know about beforehand! The nearest lift and slope (blue) and ski hire are within 3 mins of the back of the hotel. There are a couple of nice Reds running onto the blue behind the hotel. We also went onto the glacier in the cable cars with the kiddies just to show them what it was like. We didnt get to the neighbouring village which is linked by cable car and looks really pretty but will do next time.

Biggest moan is lack of a briefing and general information flow. Although the rep was great and we made a point to find her and ask our questions you sometimes don't know what you don't know...e.g. bus service stopping outside the hotel. Others in the hotel did mention this as an issue.

Changed our accommodation 3 days before travel meaning we could not be together as planned, no apology or compensation, rude customer service. Then they cancelled our holiday the day before we travelled and blamed me for cancelling! Just about managed to get it reinstated. Avoid avoid avoid!

We decided to book a ‘package holiday’ (we normally book independently)for several reasons this year. Never again with Crystal.

We decided on Wengen, a resort we had been to before and were, fortunately as it turned out, familiar with.

The booking process was painful, took a full 3 days for our travel agent to be able to speak to anyone. So long in fact that the contingent of our group that was flying from a different airport booked with Inghams … and what a better experience all round they had!

Vouchers for pre paid lift passes, travel passes, train tickets and ski lessons had to be chased by ourselves, and then the information was sketchy.

We were travelling on a Saturday and received a train timetable for Tuesday.

We weren’t told that the ski pass voucher needed printing, otherwise the ski pass wouldn’t be issued (big thanks to skiset shop in Wengen for printing this out)

On arrival in Geneva we were told we could ‘if we wanted to ‘go see the travel rep on the way out of the airport to the train station. We did so, thinking she may be interested to hear we’d arrived safely and beable to give us some info on best trains to get. She seemed a bit surprised to see us, spouted a lot of platform numbers to us (there are 4 train changes to get to Wengen) and left us to get on with it. I have to add that the flight time from Manchester means there’s little room for late luggage or flight arrivals to allow you to catch the last connecting trains to Wengen.

If you were unfamiliar with train travel or the Swiss train system this would be a very stressful experience. Fortunately we have done the journey several times.

I must add, I can’t fault the hotel (Wengenhof) at all - they were fab and even fed us at 10pm.

The rest of our party had travelled with Inghams and had a ‘Welcome’ pack full of useful information

Nothing for Crystal holidaymakers!!

No direction as to where to go to find out what day, time and meeting place for ski lessons, no telling us the ski pass voucher needed to be printed, no direction to ski hire shop or opening times. What a shambles. I really can’t imagine how stressful this would be if you were unfamiliar with the resort, or, even worse, if you were unfamiliar with the whole ski holiday experience/organisation/ how to do it.

Departure day …. Inghams guests had a note to suggest the best time train to get - nothing for Crystal … no surprise there.

Really struggling by now to see what the ‘package’ bit of this holiday is. We really would have been more informed, more organised , less stressed and spent less money if we’d have gone independently. There was no ‘package’ at all - just commission to crystal for putting all the various add ins through their system.

Geneva airport was a nightmare. Maybe not directly Crystals fault, but as they use EasyJet and EasyJet use Geneva they have to take some ownership of the issues.

We queued , snaking in and out of the building, with no seats and no drink for a full 3 hours (we’ve done some travelling in our lives, and this was a record). On asking what the issue was , to 2 separate staff members, we were told it’s always like this on a Saturday - too many passengers and not enough staff. How can this be, the airline and airport were fully aware we were all travelling that day, to my knowledge no one woke up that morning and said “Let’s just pop to Geneva for a flight today” - we’d all booked weeks/months in advance!

After 3 exhausting hours of queueing (thank goodness we don’t have young children) we were rushed through security and hustled to the plane- no time to grab a drink or snack. Another hour of standing and, at long last, after 4 hours of standing in line we get on the plane. Our worst airport experience in 35 years , and , bearing in mind one of us used to travel weekly for business meetings to various parts of the world, that’s quite a lot of experience to draw on.

We can categorically say never again will we use Crystal and will avoid Geneva airport whenever possible.

Inghams and independent travel are the only way.