With the strongest green credentials in French skiing, and a resort that changes character every few hundred metres. Here is what is new for winter 2026/27.
Most ski resorts ask you to pick a hotel. Les Arcs asks you to pick a village, and the answer changes the entire holiday. There are six, strung up the mountain from a working town to a peak, and they have almost nothing in common beyond the lift pass. That is unusual, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before booking.
Choosing your altitude
Bourg Saint Maurice sits at the bottom and is a real mountain town with a life of its own all year, which makes it the pick for anyone who wants restaurants and a high street more than a boot room by the piste.
Arc 1600 is the original village, designed by Charlotte Perriand, and the quietest of the six. Arc 1800 is the hub, where the shops, the restaurants and most of the evening noise live. Arc 1950 is the polished one, pedestrianised and upscale, and the easiest place to eat well without walking far. Arc 2000 sits highest, beneath the Aiguille Rouge, and exists for people whose priority is being on snow before anybody else.
For a short stay, Arc 1800 or Arc 1950 do the most work. Both put dinner within walking distance and the lifts within a few minutes.
The architecture is the sleeper attraction
Arc 1600 and Arc 1800 both hold the Architecture Contemporaine Remarquable label, and the story behind them is better than the average resort origin myth.
Les Arcs was built in the 1960s by Charlotte Perriand, Roger Godino, Robert Blanc and Guy Rey-Millet, with the deliberate aim of opening mountain holidays to people who had been priced out of them. The buildings step down the slope rather than sitting on top of it, maximising the view while minimising the scar on the landscape. Perriand, who spent much of her career working alongside Le Corbusier, designed interiors here that people still travel specifically to see.
It remains one of the most distinctive pieces of mountain architecture in the Alps, and a genuinely interesting hour for anyone who has run out of legs but not out of curiosity.
Green credentials that stand up
Plenty of resorts talk about environmental commitments. Les Arcs has the paperwork to back it.
It is the first and only French ski destination holding two Flocons Verts, the certification recognising environmental transition in mountain areas. It was also the first mountain resort in Europe to achieve B Corp certification, which covers social as well as environmental standards and is notoriously hard to obtain.
If your company reports on travel emissions, or your clients ask about it, this is a resort that answers the question before you have finished asking it.
What is new this winter
The most significant change is a lift. The old Lonzagne, universally known as the red yoghurt pots, has been replaced by a gondola carrying ten people a cabin and up to 900 an hour, linking Peisey-Nancroix with Plan Peisey in three minutes and twenty seconds. Anyone who has queued there will understand why this matters.
New Easy Ski routes now guide beginners and nervous skiers back to the villages on quieter pistes, which improves both safety and the general mood at four o’clock. The Les Pitchouns fun run at Peisey-Vallandry has been redesigned as a forest themed trail with hidden characters and surprises along the way, aimed squarely at families and first timers.
In the evenings, Les Arcs becomes the first French ski resort to host Candlelight, the international classical concert series. The Centre Bernard Taillefer will be lit by thousands of candles on 27 December 2026 and 8 January 2027. It is an unusually good answer to the question of what to do with a mountain evening that does not involve a bar.
Though there is a new bar too. La Descente in Arc 1800 has been opened by Champagne winegrowers Clémence Vautrain and Gauthier, pouring a hand picked list from producers they rate personally. Down in Bourg Saint Maurice, La Belle Cocotte serves generous French comfort food built on family recipes, run by Thomas and Stéphanie.
Two experiences here are worth knowing about if you are ever asked to organise something for a group, because both beat a booked table comfortably.
The Ski Patrol Academy and the weekly First Tracks sessions take you onto the mountain before the lifts open, to watch the piste preparation, the safety operations and what the patrol teams actually do at dawn. Coulisses de la Neige, held every Thursday in Arc 2000, explains how the snowmaking network runs, when snow is produced and what part it now plays in keeping a ski area viable at all.
Both are the sort of thing people talk about afterwards, which is more than can be said for most incentive programmes.
Timing it right – three dates are worth building a trip around.
The Les Arcs Film Festival runs from 12 to 19 December 2026, combining screenings with industry guests and emerging European talent. The 2026 edition spotlights Spain and examines the relationship between artificial intelligence, humanity and the natural world, which makes it a rare thing: a genuine professional reason to be in a ski resort in December.
The Les Arcs Star Trail on 12 March 2027 sends runners around a night time mountain course above Arc 1800 nd the Electronic Peak Festival, from 26 to 28 March 2027, brings three days of DJs, live performances and outdoor sets to a resort in spring snow.
The numbers
Les Arcs recorded 2,614,000 skier days in 2025/26 and sits within the 425km Paradiski area. It keeps 70% of its slopes above 2,000m, which is the figure that matters most in a warming Alps, and offers 17 high altitude activities beyond the skiing, from zip lines to tobogganing to mountain museums, for the days when the legs have given up.
The case for two extra days
Skiing carries a reputation as a week long commitment, which suits a family half term and suits almost nobody else. Les Arcs is one of the few resorts that rewards a short stay, because there is enough here beyond the pistes to fill the hours when you are not on them. Which leaves the only real question being whether you can move the Friday meeting.
