Has it been 500 already, Yelp? Here we go, my 500th review for which I chose one of the most…read moremagical places in the world. And luckily I'll be first to review too!
The Waldhotel in Arosa is, in my eyes, the most perfect hotel in the world. Sure it's not five stars like the "pimp hotel" on the other side of town, and sure Peter the driver/concierge once closed the van door on my fingers, making skiing very difficult for me that week, but the Waldhotel is truly a special place.
This is where Thomas Mann wrote his Magic Mountain, which is why one of the dining rooms is named after him. The Waldhotel in Davos claims the same, but as an academic and an expert in German history and literature, especially Thomas Mann and modernist German literature, I can assure you that Arosa is the true inspiration for the Waldhotel, which you'll see in the novel's descriptions of the location.
The rooms are so comfortable with their thick down duvets and smooth, white linens. The furniture is all made of natural, Swiss wood and really gives you a sense of the traditional style of the region. None of that bland corporate stuff here, it's all local luxury: Switzerland in style.
The food is amazing, they have a huge buffet in the morning, and a fabulous, contemporary menu in the evening with healthy options for those who are on a diet or are looking for that 'spa experience'. The bar is so comfortable too, with its silly entertainers, usually a duo with a keyboard player and a singer, doing covers of 1970s and 1980s songs while you sit at the bar chatting with the bar tender sipping your Irish coffee after a long, exhausting day of skiing.
Skiing and hiking are easy here, just walk or ski out of the hotel! You can ski right to the lifts, and take a side route from the slopes to ski straight back to the hotel ski room. Super convenient. Downtown is right down the hill on the other side of the hotel. Little bit of a walk back uphill, but you can always use the shuttle!
The staff here is fabulous. The hotel has been run for many years by the same family, the Volks. And for at least two decades they've put on musicals on the last day of the week, every week. All the high level staff members participate. Most memorable was the year they performed Starlight Express, with rollerblading tracks set up throughout the lobby and bar, and the owners rollerskating around the room!! You can tell everyone is passionate about working at the Waldhotel, they're a team and a family. The board on the wall when you come in shows you all the faces and names, so you can get to know them from the moment you walk in.
The interns from different hotel schools are great too, and on occasion we would go out to bars with them in town. While Arosa isn't a party town in the way some ski resorts are, we always had a blast as teenagers. In the evenings we'd go to the club and bars in town for some Apres-Ski fun and to meet the young people who'd come up from the city for a few days. The Waldhotel also arranges various activities, and does ski competitions, which were always overrun by our family, with my brother and two cousins taking first, second and third spot each year during the week we were there.
After I moved to America, the only thing I missed as much as home was our annual visits to the Waldhotel. For years I kept all the post cards my family sent me from Arosa, decorating my walls of my American apartments with them, thinking about all the good times we had.
If you love the movie Dirty Dancing, you probably get that warm, nostalgic feeling thinking about that family resort with its old fashioned activities, family-run management, and handsome young seasonal workers. The Waldhotel feels like that to us. Luxury without being over the top (which makes it more family friendly than the 'pimp hotel' on the other side of town which is always full of 60 year olds with their 18 year old girlfriends), fun, with lots of silly but fun activities, and a place that will leave you with warm memories for the rest of your life. The kind of place you didn't think existed anymore in this world, yet it does: right in Arosa.
