History of Les Portes du Soleil

Les Portes du Soleil is one of the largest European interconnects centered around Morzine-Avoriaz, in the French Alps and straddling into neighboring Switzerland.
The story started shortly after the hometown’s skier Jean Vuarnet, won a gold medal in downhill at the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. In the late summer of that year, Vuarnet met with a group of neighboring Swiss ski industry leaders and started to envision the first international interconnect that would eventually network eleven resorts between Savoie and Valais.

"To established French ski areas that had built their snow trade since the 1930’s, it made little sense to open the flood gates and let their hard-won clientele wonder over the Swiss border..."

The group of innkeepers and ski instructors from Champery and Val d’Illez that had met with Jean Vuarnet was gung-ho about the project as they were starving for more tourist traffic into their remote valleys, their French counterparts were lukewarm at best. To established ski areas like Morzine, Les Gets and Chatel that had gradually built their snow trade since the 1930’s, it made little sense to open the flood gates and let their hard-won clientele wonder over the border. That fear was also shared by a number of Swiss stakeholders. “Why send our few clients to the competitors” was a common comment heard on both sides of the border.

In spite of these reactions, a company was set up in 1963 and opened to any interested French or Swiss entity interested by the project. The first practical step was a 3-D model of the networked resorts built for the Lausanne National Swiss Expo of 1964. At the Expo, the model got noticed by the press and elicited a great deal of interest from the public. The project was christened “Portes du Soleil” or “Gateway to the Sun”.

In January of 1968, almost eight years after the first brainstorming, the connection between Morzine-Avoriaz and Champery was established with the completion of two lifts meeting on the ridgeline separating the two countries. The following year a joint ski pass was offered to skiers looking for a borderless adventure. Before the computer age, it was agreed that each resort would keep its sales receipts regardless of the actual usage by consumers who had purchased the interconnected pass.

In the mid seventies, more ski resorts joined in and now the network looked more like a modern day’s interconnect. By 1981, the vision that started in 1960 became a solid reality; by that time, all participating ski mountains had adopted the same computerized ski-pass system that would compensate each partner on the basis of actual usage by skiers and snowboarders. Today, the Portes du Soleil claims a network of eleven mountain villages offering 40,000 acres of ski and snowboard runs served by 194 lifts, 150 miles of cross-country tracks and 240 miles of snowshoe trails.