Winter 2026-27 in the Alps: when the palace hotels open, St. Moritz to Cortina

Badrutt’s Palace opens for the winter on 3 December 2026, and the Alpine season follows its lead. The Kulm opens on the 4th, the Carlton on the 11th, Gstaad Palace on the 15th, the Riffelalp above Zermatt on the 11th, and in Cortina The First is due on the 4th while the Cristallo waits for 2027. Those are the dates that decide a December in the mountains, and they sit on top of a lift calendar that starts far earlier: Cervinia on 24 October, Zermatt on 1 November, Kronplatz and Courmayeur on 28 November, the Sella and Courchevel on 4 December. Here is the winter of 2026-27 read from the hotel desk rather than the ticket office, resort by resort, with every date taken from the house’s or the lift company’s own pages this weekend.

St. Moritz: three palaces, three dates

No resort publishes its winter as precisely as St. Moritz, and none has more at stake in it. Badrutt’s Palace, 157 rooms and three Michelin Keys, opens on 3 December and closes on 30 March; it is also number 36 in The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2026, with the Art of Hospitality award. The Kulm, 150 rooms, runs from 4 December to 29 March, its first winter with three Keys after the promotion of 18 September. The Carlton, 70 rooms, opens on 11 December and closes on 21 March. Suvretta House gives only its summer and autumn season, to 18 October, and no winter date yet. The mountains open before the palaces do. Diavolezza, on the Bernina side, starts on 17 October on Wednesdays and at weekends, Corvatsch on 21 November and Corviglia, the mountain above the town, on 28 November, with the Piz Nair cable car from 19 December. Three three-Key hotels in one village is a distinction St. Moritz shares with nowhere else in the Alps, as our list of Europe’s 82 three-Key hotels shows, and the fortnight between the Kulm’s opening and the Carlton’s is when the village belongs to residents and to the first guests.

Gstaad and Zermatt

Gstaad Palace opens on 15 December and closes on 7 March, the shortest season of any house on this page and, for its regulars, the most predictable. The Alpina Gstaad, 54 rooms and three Keys, had no winter date on its site this weekend. The Glacier 3000 lifts above Les Diablerets open on 7 November, and the main Gstaad area has not yet published its dates. In Zermatt the calendar runs the other way, mountain first. The Sunnegga and Rothorn side opens on 1 November, the Matterhorn Express from 14 November and Riffelberg from 28 November, and the Riffelalp Resort at 2,222 metres, reached by the Gornergrat railway, opens on 11 December and closes on 4 April. Neither the Mont Cervin Palace nor the Zermatterhof had printed a winter date. Across the border, Cervinia opens on 24 October and skis to 2 May, and its cross-border circuit with Zermatt needs one caveat: the Matterhorn Glacier Ride I from Trockener Steg is in revision until 30 October, so the full Italy-to-Switzerland day is a late-November proposition even though the Italian pistes open in October.

Cortina: the hotels have dates, the lifts have one

Cortina’s first winter after the Olympics starts in the hotels. The First, the town’s new opening, is due on 4 December, and Mandarin Oriental’s Cristallo still says “early 2027” without a day, as we set out in our openings calendar; Hotel de Len publishes winter rates from 1 December and Rosapetra sells an autumn stay through November. The lifts are another matter. Only the Falzarego to Lagazuoi cable car has a published winter date, 5 December to 3 April; the tourist board says the first openings on the Tofana, the Faloria and the Cinque Torri will fall between the end of November and the start of December, and the lift company’s own page still shows last winter. The Cortina Fashion Weekend runs from 4 to 8 December, and 1224, the new entry in Michelin’s September list, is covered in our note on the guide’s autumn additions. For a first week of December in Cortina, book the hotel now and expect the lifts to follow; the reverse order does not work this year.

Alta Badia and Val Gardena: everything on 4 December

The Sella opens as one. Val Gardena and the Sellaronda run from 4 December to 4 April, Alta Badia the same, and all six areas of Val di Fassa the same again; Kronplatz, a valley north, opens a week earlier, on 28 November, to 11 April. The hotels match the lifts to the day. Hotel Fanes at San Cassiano reopens on 3 December, and Aman Rosa Alpina, 51 rooms and suites with a 1,684-square-metre spa and a 20-metre heated outdoor pool, publishes its winter offers from 4 December; Hotel La Perla at Corvara resumes its offers from 8 December. Forestis on the Plose and Lefay Resort Dolomiti at Pinzolo stay open through the change of season, as we found for our Dolomites autumn guide. Arabba and the Marmolada are expected on 4 December with the rest of the Sella, though the lift company has not yet printed the date. The Dolomites’ first fortnight, from 4 to 18 December, is the one to want: the hotels are open, the pistes are new and the Christmas fortnight has not begun.

Courchevel, Megève and the French calendar

Courchevel’s lifts open on Friday 4 December and close on 18 April, Méribel and Les Menuires follow on the Saturday and the 3 Vallées links between them from the 5th. The palaces on the Jardin Alpin, Cheval Blanc Courchevel with 36 rooms and three Keys, Le K2 Palace with 29 and three Keys, and Les Airelles, which says only “reopening winter 2026”, had no dates on their sites this weekend; as a rule they open with the lifts in the first fortnight of December, but the rule is not a date. Val d’Isère opens on 28 November and skis to 2 May, and Val Thorens on 21 November with its Grand Première weekend. Megève opens a few lifts on 5 and 6 December and everything on 19 December, which is the date that matters for the Four Seasons Megève, 55 rooms and three Keys. Chamonix splits: the Grands Montets, with the first section of the new gondola from Argentière to Lognan, opens at the end of November and runs to 2 May, while Brévent-Flégère opens on 12 December to 18 April.

Austria: Lech, Kitzbühel, Ischgl

Lech Zürs and St. Anton open on 2 December and close on 18 April, with Warth-Schröcken from 4 December. Kitzbühel opens in stages: the Resterkogel on 6 November, the Hahnenkamm’s first weekend on 21 and 22 November, the complete lift link on 11 December, and the 87th Hahnenkamm Races from 18 to 24 January 2027. Ischgl opens on 26 November and skis to 2 May. Two other dates frame the winter. The World Cup opens at Sölden on 24 and 25 October, and Crans-Montana hosts the Alpine World Championships from 1 to 14 February 2027, forty years after its first, with its lifts opening on 19 December and a partial opening possible from 28 November.

The Luxury.it perspective

Read the winter from the hotel desk and it has three chapters. The first is Swiss and belongs to St. Moritz, where the palaces set the date and the mountain waits for them; a table at the Kulm on 4 December is the opening night of the Alpine season in any sense that matters to a guest. The second is the first weekend of December in the Dolomites and the 3 Vallées, when the Sella, Courchevel and the Arlberg open within four days of each other and the houses at San Cassiano and Corvara open with them. The third is Cortina, where the new hotels have dates and the lifts do not, which is a reversal of the town’s usual order and a sign of how much has been built there since the Games. Between them sits Zermatt, the one resort where the mountain is open a full six weeks before its grand hotels are. For a December booking the rule is simple: the hotel’s own page gives the date, the lift company’s gives the pistes, and half the resort homepages were still showing last winter when we checked them.

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