The past week in resort has been by far the busiest of the season. For holiday makers half term is by far the most expensive time of the season to book a ski holiday. Over the week almost every bed in town was booked out as families flooded into resort in great numbers looking to avoid an ironically snowy British winter.

Starting with a massive queue at the lift pass office early on Saturday morning the whole resort was uncomfortably packed for the entire week. Many of the main lifts in town, especially the main bubbles running up into the heart of the resort, were rammed by early morning, every morning. Queues for the main Nasserein bubble stretched down from the lift, well into the town itself, with people waiting upwards of 15 or 20 minutes to get up the mountain.

Many places in the resort take on extra staff for the weeks surrounding the half term. In particular, the Arlberg ski school take on a lot of extra staff for the two weeks in order to cater for the influx of children, both with their parents and on school trips, into resort. This presents a very unusual challenge for everybody else skiing in resort. All of a sudden there are hundreds of groups of children snaking down the mountain in an occasionally orderly formation to avoid. With the slopes also being so packed with other holiday makers, it often meant that later on in the day skiing became fairly tricky. On top of thousands of school children, the runs are so skied by late afternoon that large moguls appear on previously fairly innocuous runs. Combine this with an icy piste and poor visibility, especially in the areas surrounding the main Galzig lift, and there is a near lethal combination.

I found over the course of the week that the best thing to do in order to find some more enjoyable skiing was to immediately head for the ski runs as far away from the town as possible. The runs in the nearby resorts of Stuben and Zurs were relatively quiet in comparison and much more enjoyable to ski on.

One thing worth bearing in mind for anyone going away during peak weeks, can be problems that often occur with renting skis. Anybody arriving in the resort on the Sunday rather than the Saturday of half term week, without their own skis would have found some considerable trouble renting in town - a problem even worse for snowboarders.

A peculiarity of half term week worth mentioning was that, in contrast to the scene in town during the day and on the ski slopes, in the evenings many of the usual après hot-spots were relatively deserted. With the resort being dominated by families, St Anton, usually notorious for its lively nightlife, quickly became something of a ghost town by night. Given all this, half term in resort is an interesting week, but given the choice it’s a week best avoided.