Les 3 Vallées Pours Tens of Millions Into Lifts, Terraces and Snowmaking Ahead of the 2026/27 Season

The world's largest linked ski area is entering the new season with one of its busiest capital programmes in recent memory, as resorts across Courchevel, Méribel, Val Thorens and the Belleville valley push through a wave of lift replacements, snowmaking upgrades and mountain infrastructure ahead of opening day. (cite index="23-1,25-1">Les 3 Vallées is scheduled to run from December 5, 2026 to April 18, 2027, with Val Thorens and Orelle extending the season further still, from November 21 through May 2 thanks to their higher altitude.</cite>

Courchevel / La Tania: a new gondola for one of the valley's busiest lifts

One of the headline projects this year is a €5 million, top-to-bottom renovation of the La Tania gondola, a key access point into the Courchevel sector that carries almost 400,000 passengers each winter. All 52 cabins are being swapped out for new eight-person panoramic units, with parts of the existing lift infrastructure retained and reused specifically to cut the project's environmental footprint — a now-familiar approach across the valley's recent lift builds, where operators have increasingly emphasized reusing towers, foundations and cabling wherever engineering allows, rather than starting entirely from scratch.

The upgrade follows a pattern of major gondola investment across Courchevel in recent seasons: last winter, the resort completed a €25 million overhaul of its Côte Brune lift, lifting hourly capacity from 2,200 to 2,600 people while cutting cabin count from 128 chairs to just 51 gondola cabins and removing 11 pylons — part of a broader effort across the ski area to combine higher throughput with a lighter visual and environmental footprint on the mountain.

Courchevel: a new terrace with views over La Saulire

Skiers and pedestrians alike will also find a new 300 m² panoramic wooden terrace opening at the summit of Chenus this winter. Positioned to face south and overlook La Saulire, the terrace adds another of the scenic viewpoint installations that have become a competitive differentiator among Alpine resorts in recent years, as operators look for low-impact ways to give both skiers and non-skiing visitors a reason to ride the lifts.

Méribel: Rhodos gondola reaches its final phase

In Méribel, the long-running renovation of the Rhodos gondola will be completed in time for winter 2026/27. This final stage brings an architectural redesign of the top station and adds a new extension housing public toilets and dedicated facilities for ski schools, representing a further €1.3 million of investment on top of work already completed at the departure and mid-stations, where cabins and machinery have already been replaced in earlier phases of the project.

Méribel: Châtelet chairlift returns

Also reopening for the coming winter is the Châtelet detachable chairlift, restoring an important connective route within the Méribel ski area following a period of investment in the lift. The reconnection matters beyond Châtelet itself: Les 3 Vallées has built its identity as the world's largest linked ski domain specifically around seamless valley-to-valley, resort-to-resort travel, and any interruption to a connecting lift ripples across skier flow well beyond the immediate area it serves.

Méribel: more than €3 million for snowmaking on a key beginner run

Méribel Alpina, the resort's lift and piste operator, is investing more than €3 million to modernize the snowmaking network on the Truite piste — one of the valley's most heavily used beginner-friendly runs. The upgrade includes new-generation snow guns designed to offer both improved production performance and greater energy efficiency, reflecting an industry-wide shift toward snowmaking technology that produces more snow per unit of energy and water consumed, as resorts across the Alps face growing pressure on both fronts.

Saint-Martin-de-Belleville: a new conveyor for young and beginner skiers

At the beginner area in Saint-Martin-de-Belleville, the Biolley 2 conveyor lift is being replaced with a new-generation model, upgrading the infrastructure used by children and first-time skiers — a modest but telling investment given how much resorts increasingly compete on the quality of their beginner experience to build long-term skier loyalty.

Les Menuires / Saint-Martin-de-Belleville: €7 million for snow security

A further €7 million programme is upgrading snowmaking infrastructure across both Les Menuires and Saint-Martin-de-Belleville, aimed squarely at improving long-term snow reliability and resilience across that section of the ski area. The scale of the investment underscores how central snowmaking infrastructure has become to capital planning even at high-altitude, historically snow-secure resorts — insurance against increasingly variable early- and late-season conditions rather than a response to any one bad winter.

Val Thorens: an autonomous drone for mountain safety

Perhaps the most technologically distinctive addition across the domain isn't a lift or a piste at all. Val Thorens has introduced what the resort describes as a world first for ski areas: a next-generation, remotely operated autonomous drone deployed to support mountain safety operations. First put into service last winter around the Lac du Lou sector — a large and heavily used off-piste zone — the drone gives patrol and safety teams a persistent aerial monitoring capability over terrain that is otherwise difficult and time-consuming to survey continuously on foot or by traditional helicopter patrol. Its continued use into the 2026/27 season suggests the technology moved beyond a one-off trial and into standard operating practice, a notable marker for an industry that has been exploring drone-based avalanche monitoring and search-and-rescue applications with growing seriousness in recent years.

A domain that keeps reinvesting at scale

Taken together, this year's projects extend a pattern of sustained, valley-wide capital investment that has become something of a signature for Les 3 Vallées, which markets itself as the world's largest ski area, spanning roughly 600 kilometres of piste across Courchevel, Méribel, Brides-les-Bains, Les Menuires, Saint-Martin-de-Belleville, Val Thorens and Orelle. Beyond this year's lift and snowmaking work, the broader resort network is also investing heavily in hospitality: Courchevel is preparing for the winter 2026/27 launch of Monte-Carlo One Courchevel, a new five-star hotel brand designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, alongside the opening of Sundance Lodge in Courchevel Moriond, while Méribel completed a €2.9 million modernization of its Olympe gondola base station and pedestrian access infrastructure ahead of last season.

For skiers, the practical upshot of this winter's programme is faster, more comfortable access on some of the domain's busiest lifts, a restored connection at Châtelet, better-protected beginner terrain in two different valleys, and — care of Val Thorens — a small but symbolically significant step toward drone-assisted mountain safety. For the resorts themselves, it's the latest instalment in a long-running competitive race across the French Alps: keep reinvesting in lifts, snow security and guest experience at a scale few rival ski areas can match, in order to keep Les 3 Vallées' claim to being the world's largest interconnected ski domain from ever looking dated.