La Plagne has a well deserved, excellent reputation for being good for all levels of skiers, with a great range of well linked runs and lifts.
Wide-open motorway skiing above the treeline and gladed trails through the forest below it are the main features of the ski area. These are coupled with gentle beginner pistes and some truly outstanding off-piste, if you know where to find it. You need a guide to discover the long, sweeping descent from the Glacier de Bellecôte down to Les Bauches, as well as the challenging Cul du Nant run from the back of the glacier into the Champagny-le-Haut valley.
Scenic routes wind down through the forest to Montchavin-Les Coches, Champagny and Plagne Montalbert. Queues are generally not a feature of La Plagne, although the closure in bad weather of an arterial lift can have a knock-on effect across the entire area. The old, slow Arpette chair-lift out of Plagne-Bellecôte has long been a notorious bottleneck, but it has been upgraded to an eight-person chair. Terrain parks are located at Plagne-Bellecôte, Montchavin-Les Coches, and at Champagny. Plagne Centre has the Pro Snowpark.
Paradiski – its combined ski area with Les Arcs – is so vast that even an experienced skier will be hard put to travel from one end to the other and back in a single day. The double-decker Vanoise Express, which spans the Ponturin gorge that separates the two resorts, cost €16 million to build and is a remarkable feat of engineering. However, both La Plagne and Les Arcs are so enormous in their own right that only a small proportion of visitors to either make use of it.