Guide to February 2016 School Holidays in Alpe d'Huez

If your thinking of grabbing a late booking to the Alps in the next few weeks, you might want to factor the up and coming half-term school holidays into your thinking. It's usually very easy to see when the UK schools are on holiday, all you need to do is simply look at a holiday brochure or budget airline website and the week of UK school holidays will stick out like a sore thumb – the doubling or even trebling in the prices usually gives it away a bit!

However, unlike the UK where pretty much all schools take the same week off for half-term, the French schools stagger their February half-term holiday over a 4 week period, thus taking the pressure off transport systems, traffic, etc - but this does lead to the whole of February being a rather busy month in resort.

However some weeks are busier than others in this “peak-season” period, due to more than one French 'zone' being on holiday at any one time. Then, of course, the week of Saturday 13th to Saturday 20th February sees the UK schools on half-term as well, so this obviously forms a peak within a peak!

For school holiday purposes France is broken down into 3 distinct zones:

ZONE A – South West and Central France (including Lyon/Grenoble/etc) from the Atlantic Coast to the Swiss Border

ZONE B – Northern France from the Loire Valley to Alsace (excluding Paris and Provence)

ZONE C – The Greater Paris area and Central Southern France, Provence, Midi-Pyrenees and Languedoc

The sequence in which these areas take there holidays changes each year, and for the upcoming half term holidays the following areas and dates apply:

Saturday 6th February to Saturday 13th February – ZONE B ONLY

Saturday 13th to Saturday 20th February – ZONE A, ZONE B & UNITED KINGDOM

Saturday 20th February to Saturday 27th February – ZONE A & ZONE C

Saturday 27th February to Saturday 5th March. – ZONE C ONLY

So although the whole of February is a “peak” month, there are clear peaks within this peak period.

Saturday 13th February to Saturday 20th February sees Zone A, B and the UK schools all on holiday and will lead to the Alps being extremely busy.

However, the first and last weeks of this “peak” period see only 1 zone of French schools on holiday, so things shouldn't be too busy in these weeks.

This system of phasing of school holidays not only happens at half-term but at every school holiday period, so bear this in mind. The reason behind this system is to attempt to relieve pressure on transport systems, traffic loads and to give tourism related businesses a longer period of school based trade – for example 4 weeks of steady trade, rather 1 week of madness as is the case back in the UK. It is also in an attempt to keep costs a bit lower for families, as there is in theory less pressure on hotel room availability, flights, ferries, etc.

A similar system is implemented in the Netherlands also. Maybe the UK should take note…….