Just parking the coaches near Departures and Arrivals is a nightmare at Geneva or Lyon nowadays. This is the sort of rapid system Geneva could offer thirty years ago and Lyon perhaps ten years ago, but which is no longer possible when airports become huge. The departure area is 50m from check-in, the aircraft another 100m.

Our staggered coaches drop passengers just outside check-in, and four check-in desks whip a busload through every fifteen minutes, so queues are short and quick-moving. The arrangements for departure from Grenoble are also straightforward. Chambéry is about half an hour closer, but is so difficult to land at, and so often closed for bad weather, that we wouldn’t go there even if our aircraft weren’t too big to use it. Geneva is slightly closer, but the route is circuitous, and the journey takes longer. The journey from Grenoble airport to Val d’Isère is exactly the same as from Lyon airport: about 2 hours 45 minutes. While tightened security measures for non-Schengen Zone countries slowed down passport control at all of the Alpine Airports, including Grenoble, last season, as our aircraft stops just a couple of hundred yards from the buses, coming through Grenoble is still usually the quickest option. Passengers walk straight to the small terminal to find passport control about 100m from the plane, their bags 10m past passport control, and the YSE transfer coaches just outside. Our aircraft parks right by the terminal so there is no waiting for buses to take passengers to a distant terminal, or walking miles along corridors or walkways! Its runway is one of the longest in France, and its weather record the best in the area: it was not closed once last winter for snow, ice, fog, wind or anything else. Grenoble airport is the best-kept secret in the Alps, perhaps because it is so far from Grenoble and so badly signposted that nobody can ever find it! But it is the perfect YSE-style airport.

Grenoble airport arrivals departures