Vanessa Douglass
A once in a lifetime experience being guided by Matthew of the Mountain Company
We loved our time in Zermatt! We were in Zermatt for 6 nights and had 5 full days skiing. As a first time visitor from Australia, you really can't appreciate the vastness of the mountain before arriving and heading up. We are a family of 5 and we booked to ski with Matt for 5 full days, utilising the private ski instructor/ guiding offering.
What I loved about the Mountain Company is that you pay a one off service fee and then you sit back and relax, letting the experts take over. The Mountain Company handled the booking of all of our rail passes, ski lift passes, restaurant bookings, booking a ski boot fitter and ski hire. This was invaluable as it saved so much time and allowed us to utilise all of their local knowledge....such as the best way to book our ski lift passes to get the best price...for example on certain days our children could ski over to Cervinia for free, on the train passes our kids also were able to travel in first class...all of these little tricks and local nuances that could have been missed by me, were all organised by the Mountain Company. If we hadn't engaged TMC all of these logistics would have been so complicated and time consuming. They were able to work out all of the logistics and make our arrival seamless and effortless. Matt was also happy to listen to all the suggestions I had...mostly garnered from Instagram....and help us to work out what we wanted to focus on from all of these.
We had Matthew Grundy ski with us for 5 days in a full day personal guide capacity. We didn't necessarily want ski lessons, we wanted to ski together as a family, knowing we had different interests and abilities, and we wanted to make sure that we saw as much of the mountain as possible. I think in 5 days we rarely did a run twice. Matthew's local knowledge of the mountain was unbelievable. He was also able to manage all 5 of the big personalities in our family and he made each one of us feel listened to and important. We have skied all over the world and so often you meet arrogant ski instructors who make you feel like you can't ski....we get it...we don't do seasons every year...but not Matt, he did not make us feel like this at all!!!! He allowed us to be guided, which was our main focus and every now and again gave us amazing ski technique feedback, which made sense instantly and could be used straight away. We also enjoyed 5 beautiful lunches together which was also part of the brief from us. He chose beautiful restaurants and made all the bookings for us, during peak time, which also took a lot of the stress off.
We just really loved being guided by Matt over those 5 days. With the vastness of the mountain, not having to worry about where we were going to ski on a day to day basis was just such a relief!!!! Matt's brief was to show us as much of the resort as possible and to find the best ski conditions for us as we were there mid December...so a bit early. Honestly, just walking out in the morning, seeing Matt's smiling face (he was never moody) and heading off with him having organised the day ahead was sweet relief! Just getting to Zermatt from Australia with 3 kids was enough work...happily handing over the day's navigation to Matt was such a blessing. He also made sure each day to tie into our days some sort of sightseeing interest on slopes, whether it be to ski in to pat some local black sheep or go to the highest view point in Zermatt...each day something else interesting was added into our day. I also never felt like we were "on the clock". There was a lot of flexibility about starting early and getting home on last runs. Matt was just so flexible easy. The personable touch was also there. He didn't have to but on the day we arrived we were buying new boots before we started skiing the next day, and just to say "hi", Matt popped in to welcome us to Zermatt. That was really appreciated by us.
