Luxury car rental in Courchevel

The altitude numbers everyone still uses were officially retired in the 2011-12 season. What was 1300 is Le Praz, 1550 is Courchevel Village, 1650 is Moriond, and 1850 is simply Courchevel. The commune is newer than the renaming: Saint-Bon-Tarentaise merged with La Perrière on 1 January 2017 to form the commune of Courchevel. Counting La Tania, that is six villages, five with their own car parks, none interchangeable when a driver is hunting for your chalet in the dark. We ask for the village, not the number, before the transfer is confirmed.

The single most useful fact about Courchevel is a table of ceiling heights. The mairie runs the car parks itself, fourteen of them, about 2,600 spaces, and every one publishes its limit. Put a ski box on a V-Class and it clears two metres — locked out of Croisette, Porte de Courchevel and Moriond, marginal everywhere at 2.10 m. Sarettà, Loze, Alpamayor and Alpinium take it. That is the calculation we run before sending a car, and the reason we ask how many pairs of skis are travelling.

On the street, metered parking runs 08:00 to 20:00 daily from 1 December to 30 April along the rue de la Croisette, rue du Rocher, rue de l'Église, rue des Verdons, rue des Clarines, rue de Plantrey and rue Park City. The first 45 minutes are free at 1850, the first three hours at Le Praz. The rule that catches people is the snow one: parking is suspended by temporary order posted on the spot for clearing, and the car must move when the sign appears. Recovery costs €113 plus €6 a day. A car left a week at 1850 with nobody watching the signs is a car you collect from the fourrière.

The centre of 1850 is partly pedestrian. The rue de l'Église between the rue de Bellecôte and the rue des Clarines closes to traffic Monday to Friday from 16:00 to 19:00, turning its downhill lane one-way uphill and pushing access round by the rue des Clarines and the place du Rocher. It has worked that way since the winter of 2021 — and 16:00 to 19:00 is exactly when a chalet handover wants to happen, so we plan it for the other side of the block.

Winter equipment is a legal requirement, not a precaution. Under the decree of 16 October 2020 it runs from 1 November to 31 March, and in Savoie the prefect applied it to the whole department, so there is no commune list to check — Courchevel is covered. Compliance means tyres carrying the three-peak snowflake mark, or two metal chains on board, or snow socks; an M+S marking alone no longer counts. The honest footnote: the decree activating penalties was not published in 2025, and a Senate answer of 12 February 2026 records the rule being applied without sanction since 2021-22. We treat it as an equipment standard rather than a fine to dodge. The practical consequence is unchanged — a rear-driven supercar on summer tyres cannot take chains, which settles what we source for this valley.

Geneva is 179 km and two hours by the resort's own reckoning. Ours is 150 minutes on a normal day and 270 in season; on a peak Saturday, three hours is optimistic. The last leg is the RD91 out of Moûtiers: roughly 21 km and 1,370 m of climb from a station standing at 480 m, at 8 to 8.5 per cent up to Village, easing to 4 to 6.5 through Moriond. In good conditions, forty minutes. In snow, behind a gritter, it is not.

Everything funnels. The A43 runs to Chambéry, then the RN90 through Albertville and Moûtiers, and that single road serves every resort in the Tarentaise — more than two hundred thousand vehicles across the Tarentaise and Maurienne on a peak weekend. The chokepoint has a name: the Gorges de Ponserand, at the northern exit of Moûtiers, where a rockfall in February 2025 severed access to the Tarentaise resorts outright and traffic was held only by reversing the Ponserand tunnel to two-way running. The Savoie prefecture keeps a live works page for the RN90. That page, not a mapping app, is what gets checked the morning of a transfer.

The bad Saturdays are predictable a year out, because the school calendar sets them. For 2027, the overlaps make Saturday 13, 20 and 27 February the days two zones move at once. The precedent is documented: 14 February 2026 was classified red for departures across Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. If your dates land on one of those Saturdays we will say so and propose a Friday or Sunday arrival, rather than quietly sell you a transfer that will take four and a half hours.

The station is Moûtiers – Salins – Brides-les-Bains, at 480 m, which becomes an international stop in winter. For 2026-27 the Eurostar ski train runs outbound from 19 December to 20 February: London St Pancras at 09:01, a two-minute connection at Lille, Moûtiers at 17:00. The return leaves Bourg-Saint-Maurice at 13:45 and reaches London at 21:27. Read that arrival time carefully. Seventeen hundred on a Saturday is the darkest, busiest hour of the transfer week, and in December and January it is already past the practical helicopter window. Line S65 runs Moûtiers to Courchevel all year with one pair of skis included — a reasonable fallback, a poor plan for six people with luggage.

The altiport is not a normal airfield and should not be sold as one. It sits at 2,008 m with a runway of 537 m at a gradient of 18.6 per cent. Every landing is uphill on runway 22 and every take-off downhill on 04, regardless of wind, and the terrain removes the option of a go-around: once committed on approach, the aircraft lands. There is no instrument approach and no lighting, so it is day visual flight only, 09:00 to 19:00 or sunset. Crews need the French mountain rating or a site licence revalidated by landing there at least once every six months. Jets do not operate — it is Caravans, PC-12s and helicopters. Geneva by helicopter is about thirty-five minutes, and that option closes at dusk and in low cloud, which here is ordinary weather rather than exotic.

The season is fixed: lifts turn from 4 December 2026 to 18 April 2027, and again 4 July to 30 August 2026, when metered parking is switched off across the commune apart from La Rosière. A car here in July is straightforward. In February it is a logistics question, and we would rather treat it as one.