Chatel Part 1

Chatel Continued part 3

Has anybody heard of the ESI if you have or have not don't use them, had some trouble in Chatel booking "Bronze" lessons for Little W with the ESF so I dumped them in Favour of this company ESI who responded to my Email within 45 mins so all good ready to go. Turn up at their offices in Chatel to be told that they have no bronze lessons available, they did offer us a not particularly fantastic deal for some private lessons but I told them to poke it as they could have emailed before I took the bother to trample all over chatel to find their office, great customer service , I think not.
So across the road was the good old ESF so booked Little W into four one and half hour private lessons with them ... much to Mrs W enjoyment Paul turned up on Monday morning not quite as good looking as me but a tad younger .... Mrs W thought he was a dish, fickle Women.
So Little W spent her lessons with Paul half technical and half off-piste, she skied Blacks, moguls and off-piste and sailed through her Bronze badge.
The cost of all this amounted to €210 .... I suppose it is money well spent when you see your kids develop.
But when are these companies gonna realise that they cannot treat their customers this way ..... so use the ESI at your peril.

Congratulations to Little W for passing the Bronze with the ESF,in spite of that other useless ski school. I don't think I could. Those kids tests are terribly hard! We had a go once, in our advanced lesson, and I couldn't make my turns tight enough.

Ally

Thanks Ian for the post; very timely actually, as a French friend has just bought a small apartment in Chatel which he is offering out at a reasonable rate. Never having skied the PDS at all I'm reasding your comments carefully !

billip1 wrote:Thanks Ian for the post; very timely actually, as a French friend has just bought a small apartment in Chatel which he is offering out at a reasonable rate. Never having skied the PDS at all I'm reasding your comments carefully !

More to come my friend .....

Thanks Ian - you promised to respond to my cry for information, and have come good!

A friend and I are off there on 28 Feb for six days - anyone else around at the same time?

Very glad to hear little W did so well - we found the ESF unsympathetic with our children when they were small, and decamped to Andorra for a few years where the ski school there was superb - but that was quite a few years ago.

I suspect the ESF have had to raise their game with so much competition (at the time our kids were small, the ESF had a French closed-shop which was overturned by law).

skifun wrote:Thanks Ian - you promised to respond to my cry for information, and have come good!

A friend and I are off there on 28 Feb for six days - anyone else around at the same time?

Very glad to hear little W did so well - we found the ESF unsympathetic with our children when they were small, and decamped to Andorra for a few years where the ski school there was superb - but that was quite a few years ago.

I suspect the ESF have had to raise their game with so much competition (at the time our kids were small, the ESF had a French closed-shop which was overturned by law).

Had the odd issue with them well really one Instructor, but over all I have found them very good, I think you need to remember that not all kids want to learn and I guess can be very difficult to control for the Instructor but overall I would recommend them :thumbup:
What was the issue with them with your Young uns ??

I suppose one thing I must add Little W strapped on her planks this year and was totally average for the first couple of hours I think the young lady was a little over confident, I really had to go back to basic's with her but it all came back in the end ..... but she learnt a lessons about thinking about what she is doing incorrectly and putting it right.
But to her credit she is a good little listener and came through her first hick-cup with flying colours.

Ian Wickham wrote:What was the issue with them with your Young uns ??

This was very many years ago - young 'un is now in university - but we were put off by the large class sizes the ESF ran, and the fact that you'd see crying children all over the mountain with little sympathy from ESF instructors - difficult for them to attend to one fallen child when there were so many in their groups.

So, we booked a private lesson for our 5-year-old and agreed where to meet the instructor afterwards. His English was patchy to say the least, and was nowhere to be seen when we turned up to collect her.

After some frantic searching, we discovered her in a lift hut - perfectly happy as the liftie was giving her sweets - but we weren't so thrilled at her being abandoned - and it was Andorra for the next 3 or 4 times for us with excellent English speaking instructors who the kids had lots of fun with.

By the time we returned to France, there was more competition amongst ski schools, so other ones to choose from rather than ESF - but, as I said, I think as a result of the competition, the ESF have had to raise their game too.