We booked our first family snowboarding holiday last February, to a small resort in the French Alps, with two kids aged seven and eleven who had never seen a mountain in their lives. I’d like to say it went smoothly. It mostly did, in the end, but there were a good few moments in the first forty-eight hours where I sat in a rental shop queue wondering what on earth we’d signed ourselves up for. 
We’re going again this winter. This time I feel like I actually know what I’m doing, which is entirely because of the things we got wrong the first time round. So here they are, in the hope they save somebody else the same faff.
1. The size of the board matters far more than which board it is
I assumed a snowboard was a snowboard. You turn up, they hand you one roughly the right length, off you go. That is broadly what happened, and it is also why my eldest spent the first two days convinced she was rubbish at it.
She wasn’t rubbish at it. Her board was too long for her, which meant she couldn’t turn it properly, which meant she fell over constantly and got increasingly fed up. The instructor spotted it on day three, swapped her onto something shorter, and she was linking turns by the afternoon. Same child, same lesson, different board.
What I didn’t know is that board length is worked out mainly from the rider’s weight rather than their height, and there’s a fair bit of difference between the right size and one that’s close enough. When we got home I went down a bit of a rabbit hole reading about how to buy a snowboard properly, and the part that stuck with me was how straightforward the sizing actually is once somebody lays it out in a chart. Width matters too, and that one’s based on boot size, so that your toes and heels don’t drag in the snow when you turn.
We’re still renting this year, because the kids are growing at an alarming rate and buying feels mad. But I’ll be walking into that shop with their weights written down and I will be asking questions.
2. Book the lessons before you fly
I’d vaguely assumed we’d sort lessons when we arrived. Everyone else had booked theirs in about November. By the time I tried, the children’s group sessions for our week were full, and we ended up cobbling together a mix of private lessons at eye watering cost and me attempting to teach a seven year old myself, which I can confirm is not a job for a parent who has also never snowboarded.
Book them the moment your accommodation is confirmed. Group lessons for kids are usually the best value thing you’ll buy on the whole trip, and they fill up months ahead in half term weeks.
3. Half days are plenty
We had this idea that we’d all be out on the mountain from nine until four, making the most of every expensive minute. On day one we managed until about half past one, at which point my youngest sat down in the snow and refused to move.
Snowboarding is exhausting when you’re learning. There’s a lot of falling over, a lot of getting back up, and it’s cold and bright and overwhelming. Two or three hours in the morning, lunch, then something gentler in the afternoon worked far better for us. The swimming pool at our hotel got more use than the slopes did, and nobody minded in the slightest.
4. Check what your travel insurance actually covers
This is the one that genuinely worries me in hindsight. I’d renewed our annual family policy in the autumn and assumed we were sorted. We weren’t. Standard travel insurance very often excludes winter sports entirely, and you need to add cover specifically.
I only discovered this a fortnight before we left, when a friend mentioned it in passing. Adding winter sports cover cost us about forty pounds for the family. Mountain rescue and repatriation, if you need them, cost rather more than that. ABTA has a clear rundown of what to check before a snow holiday, including the fact that a GHIC card won’t cover being airlifted off a mountain, and that some policies require helmets to be worn for the cover to be valid. Read your policy. Actually read it, not just the summary page.
5. The small stuff nobody warns you about
Goggles, not sunglasses, for the kids. Sunglasses fall off and get lost within about an hour, and goggles are far better in wind anyway. Sun cream, even when it’s freezing. The sun bounces off the snow and my husband came home with a burnt nose in February, which he found less funny than the rest of us did.
Snacks in every pocket. Mountain restaurants are expensive and the queues at lunchtime are grim. A pocket full of cereal bars prevented several meltdowns, mine included. Spare gloves. Gloves get soaked on day one because small children spend a lot of time with their hands in the snow, and drying them overnight on a radiator does not reliably work. And finally, lower your expectations for the first trip. Ours was not the elegant family ski holiday I’d pictured. It was cold, chaotic and involved a lot of crying, not all of it from the children. But by the last day both kids could get down a green run on their own, and they have talked about it more or less constantly ever since. That’s the bit that counts.
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