St. Moritz: Deals abound, but you must read fine print
and local professional hiking guides, greet me. As a warmup hike, we amble up Alp Muntatsch through evergreens furred with bearded lichen. They tell me how local ant species absorb sun and radiate heat back into the colony, point out that gentians shut their petals in cold rain and teach me to recognize the short, keen whistles of marmots. We climb above the timberline, skirting lime-green fields. Sharp, white Alps rise and fall like the electrocardiogram of a massive heartbeat.
Below us, the Upper Engadin is traversed by the opalescent Inn River, fed by the waterfalls and glaciers of the eastern Alps. The riverbanks are dotted with well-maintained and pretty historical towns. (Just try finding a piece of garbage.) Lakes gleam indigo at the base of intensely teal mountains, their peaks brightly snow-capped. Approximately at mid-center, curving around its own famed lake, St. Moritz sits pretty. Negotiating Airbnb
St. Moritz is divided into two neighborhoods: the luxurious upper St. Moritz Dorf — of Prada and MiuMiu stores — and the generally more-affordable, lake-level St. Moritz Bad (which is not a description, but the German word for baths, a reference to the mineral springs). I direct myself to St. Moritz Bad. I set a nightly price cap of $150 for lodging, and budget $50 a day for food and other expenses.
Most Airbnbs require a week-long stay, but because I was arriving early in summer I had been able to reserve a four-night stay in a small, one- bedroom apartment for $111 a night.
Sven, my calm host, shows me the ropes, providing information and advice, eventually directing me to the Coop supermarket. By making my own breakfast, packing a lunch on hikes and cooking dinner — say, spinach and ricotta ravioli, accompanied by a salad of arugula, tomatoes and nuts — meals average around $25 a day. A bottle of wine starts at $5.
This is terrific. It would be even better if there were two of us to share the room rate. Also, it would be nice to have WiFi, but I don’t; I neglected to check that fine print. And I was careless about the one-time fee for linens and cleaning, which adds $130 whether I stay one night or 10. Nonetheless, I love that it’s all mine, private and homey, with a million-dollar balcony view at no extra charge. I learn that if I had contracted directly, instead of booking through Airbnb, I could have negotiated a better price, because rentals and hotels are happy to pass on the savings to their guests from eliminating site fees. Hostel’s bonus benefits
The décor at the recently renovated St. Moritz Youth Hostel is minimalist hip, with sleek cement floors, huge windows and muted tones. In the reception area, a flat-screen TV scrolls breaking news and local happenings. Manager Roland Fischer explains: “The hostel ideal is not that you should stay in your room, so we have a number of common-use spaces.” This communal emphasis — free WiFi, a huge fireplace, children’s play sections, a selfserve cafeteria, large storage rooms for sports equipment and some maintenance supplies, such as bike repair tools — cuts overall costs.
But not everyone who comes here is on my tight budget. “Our guests are a special mix,” Fischer says. “One regular comes in by private jet. We get Bentleys and Range Rovers in the parking lot. Recently, athletes competing for Brazil’s Olympics came to train at high altitude. And nostalgic seniors.” Though, he adds, the older crowd tends to ask for a private room.
So do I, even though a single bed in a four-person dorm, without bath, costs just $47, including linens and breakfast. Unfortunately, I have a mortal dread of strangers’ snoring. My single room with private bath (also with linens and breakfast) costs $143, amounting to the same as my Airbnb apartment after the extra fees. With a plentiful dinner served in the hostel’s cafeteria for a flat rate of $18.65, my daily food tab hardly changes.
But wait: A two-night minimum stay at the hostel also comes with a free transport pass throughout the Upper Engadin. Up until now, with my Swiss half-fare, I’ve been heading by bus or train to the in-town base of a trail and ascending as far as possible. A round-trip funicular ticket to Muottas Muragl would have cost me $34, $60 to Piz Corvatsch, and so on. With the added value of this transport pass, I now can ride to the summits for free. I stand on Muottas Muragl, where the panoramic map names 29 peaks lined up like runway models. Below the tallest, 13,284-foot Piz Bernina, is the striated Morteratsch Glacier. Far below, lakes compress into iridescent blue ponds, and St. Moritz looks like a toy town. “A hotel with cultural soul”
So far, so affordable. But a week in, I discover the Hotel Laudinella — which turns out to provide, fully included in the room price, an incredible smorgasbord of St. Moritz activities.
With a two-night minimum, it costs me $150 per night for a single, including breakfast. But it comes with these additional freebies: the aforementioned Upper Engadin free public transport and cable railway pass; admission to the glamorous Ovaverva pool and health spa (otherwise $37 daily); and the hotel’s “Crystal events.”
The last perk means I can sign up, on a first-come-firstserved basis, for any of the rotating daily events — including electric-bike cruising to a traditional working farm on Mondays; gourmet taste-testing in St. Moritz on Tuesdays; or the choice between sailing Lake Sils and flying in a glider on Fridays.
This is what I mean about the fine print — at Laudinella, I would be paying $7 more a night but getting so much more value. I assumed meals would burst my fiscal bubble here, but for $35 a day, I could have a prix-fixe dinner at any of Laudinella’s six restaurants, as well as an afternoon snack.
Director Christian Schlatter tells me the hotel was originally a practice and performance space founded by a church choir; today, he says, it’s “a hotel with a cultural soul.” A curated selection of artists performs for us for free in exchange for room and board, as well as time for practice and composition. That night, I watched violinist Kamilla Schatz perform on a Stradivarius as twilight draped the Alps in deep violet.
I’ll never again treat the given price of a night’s stay as the metric for budgeting in St. Moritz. Here, the delight’s often in the details.