A 336-bed hotel in an old barracks in Briançon, an electric sled, an unprecedented festival in April and the Alpine Skiing World Championships: Serre Chevalier Briançon details its new features for the winter of 2026-2027, including the ski area, which opens from December 5 to April 18.
In 1890, the Berwick barracks housed the 159th Alpine Infantry Regiment, the «regiment of the snow», which founded a ski school in Briançon in 1904 and installed a spatula-making workshop in one of its buildings, which is now converted into a block room.
Two other addresses are being transformed
In December, the building from the late 19th century reopened under the name of the Daffy Hotel: 84 keys, including 51 rooms for two to four people and 33 apartments for up to six, for a total of 336 beds, close to 600 m² of common areas with a bar, terrace and seminar rooms, eight minutes on foot from the slopes.
The address will be operational eleven months out of twelve, after the neighboring Colaud barracks, which will become La Caserne de Briançon in 2025, will be awarded four stars. At the foot of the Prorel cable car, the youth hostel BodyGo, which will open in late 2025 with its dormitories, will add double and triple rooms as well as family suites for six to eight people this winter, for a total of 42 dormitory beds and eight rooms.
At La Salle-les-Alpes, the Grand Aigle, 60 rooms on the edge of the slopes, has been under the Friendly Hotels umbrella since the beginning of the year: the bar and restaurant have been renovated this autumn, and the rooms will follow in the winter of 2027-2028.
A woman without gas on the slopes
On the design front, Serre Chevalier is receiving the first example of the Leitwolf LTE-Motion this autumn, presented by Prinoth and the Compagnie des Alpes as the first high-power electric snowblower produced on an industrial scale.
Announced autonomy: four to five hours, extended to seven hours thanks to quick charging during the driver’s break. The vehicle comes from an assembly line installed in Montmélian, in Savoie, and the operator commits to converting its fleet, a hundred machines, over ten years.
In the same spirit, drones equipped with LiDAR sensors are now mapping the thickness of the snowpack across all 250 km of slopes, and the teams have designed their own system for measuring snow depths, which will equip all the groomers.
One festival is born, another celebrates its twentieth anniversary
The season concludes with an unprecedented event: the Outdoormix Winter Festival, from April 2 to 4 at La Salle-les-Alpes, takes place on the summit of the Pontillas cable car on the day and concerts take place at the foot of the slopes in the evening.
A week earlier, on March 26 and 28, Le Monêtier-les-Bains hosted the first-ever World Masters Championships in Alpine Skiing: a 700-meter climb on Friday evening, followed by a team race around the Dômes du Monêtier on Sunday, with 300 competitors expected.
In January, the Altitude Jazz Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary from the 16th to the 30th, with more than 40 concerts in 27 venues, from the collegiate church of Briançon to the Grands Bains du Monêtier, half of which are free admission.
In the longer term, Fahrenheit Seven has launched the construction of two hotels in La Salle-les-Alpes by the end of 2027, one of which will be for sports enthusiasts with a freestyle area of nearly 1,000 m², while Briançon is preparing its Olympic village at Fort des Têtes for 2030.