Massive new ski area planned for Swiss Alps

Two large Swiss ski areas will be joined together with a network of 18 new lifts to create one of the biggest ski regions in the Alps if recently announced plans by an Egyptian billionaire come to fruition. The billionaire, Samih Sawiris, is already mid-way through a project to add half-a-dozen luxury hotels as well as lots of other new property to the resort of Andermatt, but he now wants to make staying in them when they start to open in 2013/14 by joining the skiing at Andermatt to that at nearby Sedrun with the new lifts, creating the second biggest ski area in Switzerland in the process. The total piste kilometres of the two areas is already 250km even before new pistes are added to connect them.

The £100m plan would be overseen by SkiStar, the Scandinavian resort development company which already runs the top resorts in Norway and Sweden including Are and Hemsedal.

So far there has not been wild excitement for the proposal. Mountain user groups say it will encroach on wild places which are best left wild and even the boss of one of Andermatt’s edxisting lift companies told a Swiss news service that he thought development should be staged subject to demand rather than all at once.

http://www.andermatt.ch/