Club Med Val d'Isère

Strictly speaking, Club Med Val d'Isère has no place on these pages. It has more than two hundred rooms, a buffet at its heart and a team perfectly capable of getting a dining room on its feet to dance. It is here anyway, because it offers a kind of luxury most travellers have never heard of, and because nearly everyone inside caught it the same way: from their parents.

The condition dates back to 1950, when a Belgian named Gérard Blitz pitched army-surplus tents on a beach in Mallorca and invented a holiday where everything was included, strangers ate at shared tables and guests and staff were on first-name terms. Club Med reached Val d'Isère in 1962, and generations of children learned to ski here while their parents learned to do nothing at all. Those children grew up, acquired opinions about thread counts and came back with children of their own. Club Med had to grow up with them, and rebuilt the village as the first resort of its upmarket Exclusive Collection in the Alps.

What it kept is the setting, arguably the loveliest in the resort: a hamlet of stone-and-wood chalets in its own corner of Val d'Isère, with skis clipped on outside and mountains on every side. Rooms are warm, wooden and mostly generous. At La Légende, the bar of old wood where the champagne starts at six, live music fills the evening, and outside on the terrace of Le Chalet, braziers flicker as the sun drops behind the peaks.

The big table still matters most. At Le Bellevarde, the buffet has become a market hall, with a bakery, a fishmonger, Italian charcuterie and a cheese cellar with its own fromager, and a young, thoroughly international crowd sits at long tables where a Danish father, a couple from São Paulo and a family from Lyon compare the day's runs before dessert. Les Millésimes offers à la carte cooking and a serious cellar for nights off, but the buffet is where the evening happens.

The same spirit follows guests up the mountain. Ski lessons with local instructors come included, grouped by level, so skiing becomes a social event: by midweek, the class has its own table at lunch. Club Med invented the Mini Club, and still looks after children from four, with separate clubs for teenagers, an indoor pool and a Cinq Mondes spa for whoever ends up child-free.

This is a club, not a hideaway, and that decides everything. Two hundred rooms bring energy rather than hush, stays run Sunday to Sunday, group lessons follow a timetable and the evening entertainment is not optional for the ears. The village sits a shuttle ride from the centre, and the bill has grown up even faster than the guests.

Regulars like to say they were infected as children, and no cure has ever been found. Downstairs, in the Mini Club, a four-year-old is learning the house dance moves. In twenty-five years she will be back, with children of her own, and she will expect even more.