“Have you been to Club Med before?” asks the woman at the front desk of Club Med Québec Charlevoix, as she clips a maroon bracelet with a white disk bearing the company’s trident trademark around my wrist. This magic token will unlock the offerings of the all-inclusive ski resort over the next three days. “Usually…
But by 2014, Taos Ski Valley was a faded jewel. The New Mexico resort had lost approximately 40 percent of its skiers since its heyday in the early 1990s. Financier and conservationist Louis Bacon bought the ski area in 2014, and chief executive officer David Norden arrived two years later. Mr. Norden took a novel…
A passenger died and four others were injured after a large, unexpected wave hit a cruise ship traveling toward a popular launching point for expeditions to Antarctica, Viking Cruises said. The ship, the Viking Polaris, was struck by a “rogue wave” on Tuesday at 10:40 p.m. local time while traveling toward Ushuaia, Argentina, which is…
St. Moritz and Zermatt may be top-of-mind Swiss ski resorts, but Crans-Montana, which sits above the Rhône Valley in the French-speaking canton of Valais, serves up peak pistes and views that stretch from Mont Blanc in the west to the Matterhorn to the east. Relaxed, groomer-rich terrain and an abundance of facilities for young children,…
McCoy Park is only one of the mid- to high-elevation zones that resorts are creating to make sure beginners and intermediates have a good time and become repeat customers. This season, Steamboat in Colorado is opening a learning area, Greenhorn Ranch, at the mid-station of the new Wild Blue gondola. Also in Colorado, Copper Mountain…
A coyote walking the freshly groomed cross-country ski trails greeted us at the nearby Snowmass Club Golf Course, where we scanned a pond for ring-necked ducks, a diving duck with distinctive tattoo-like white, black and gray bills. They were sharing the ice flows with Crayola-bright mallards with vivid orange legs and velvet green heads. “Ducks…
Telluride Ski Resort, Colorado: Plunge Plunge lords over some of the best terrain in North American skiing, with steep and consistent north-facing slopes covering 2,100 vertical feet. The top of Plunge, also known as Chair 9, nears 12,000 feet and gives skiers a bevy of choices: some of the most sustained steep bump runs in…
The Carnival Valor had been at sea for only a day when calls came over the loudspeaker asking a certain passenger to please report to customer service. The man, a 28-year-old American citizen, had been reported missing by his family that morning. It was Thanksgiving, and the Valor, a 3,756-passenger cruise ship that had left…
María José Borquez, owner of Borquez & Asociados, agreed that most transactions are domestic, with many city buyers seeking homes in the south of Chile (particularly Patagonia), where she has seen a 20 percent increase in queries over the past four years, and a similar trend in pricing. “There’s a lot of interest in different…
Travel this winter, like pretty much everything else, is not expected to be a bargain. While rates for hotels and flights tend to drop after the holiday highs, resilient demand for travel portends higher prices at both ski and beach destinations, where winter is high season. Still, with flexibility and creativity — like avoiding peak…