Last year in March 2022, I went to Tomorrowland Winter for the first time! And now this year I am going again in a few days! I’m a fan of snow sports as well as music festivals, and having been to the summer version of Tomorrowland a few times, I thought this would be the perfect festival. And it was a blast, though there were a few rocky edges.

Where and when?

Tomorrowland Winter is held in the beautiful ski resort town of Alpe d’Huez in the southeast of France, in late March. The first edition was held in 2019, but then 2020 and 2021 were canceled due to COVID. Tomorrowland has a 5 year contract with Alpe d’Huez, so it’s safe to say the next few years will be held there. The event goes on for a week – you can either get a 7 day pass for the whole week or a 4 day pass for the latter half of the week. Most of the main DJs will be in the latter half of the week, and I didn’t want to spend a whole week there, so I opted for the 4 day option. However, this year I’m going for the full 7 days.

Tickets

Tickets go on sale in the Fall the year before. For the 2022 edition, tickets went on sale September, 2021. Tickets come with an included all resort ski pass for the duration of the ticket. 4 day tickets are 204€ and 7 day tickets are 329€ plus service fees (official site). This is actually exactly the cost of a normal ski pass for the same amount of time. However, as with normal Tomorrowland, you can also get ticket packages with accommodations and/or transportation to and from the festival, which I actually recommend. Due to the popularity of the event, separate tickets sell out extremely quickly. To get a better chance at getting a ticket as well as securing somewhere to stay, I recommend getting a package with accommodations. Unlike Tomorrowland Summer, there’s no need to add on transportation to give you a better chance to secure your ticket.

You can also add on a Comfort package which gives you access to elevated viewing areas, finger food, and extra services like bottle service for 275€ if that tickles your fancy.

Where to stay?

There is the main village of Alpe d’Huez as well as the surrounding villages. These are connected by ski lifts, as well a shuttle service that runs after the ski lifts close. However, I have read multiple stories of how the shuttles are unreliable and taxis are hard to find, so if you stay in a surrounding village, you may have major difficulties getting to the festival site. Thus I recommend staying near the main Alpe d’Huez village.

Tomorrowland books out most of the hotels in the main village during the festival, so unless there is some rare spot of availability, most likely you will not be able to book a hotel room during that time. There seem to be smaller lodges and AirBnBs available, but of course those can come with their own risks. Thus, as I mentioned above, I recommend booking an accommodations package with your ticket.

If you are really balling, you can book Club Med, which is all-inclusive and has really good meals. Club Med has their own rental shop and is ski-in, ski-out, but is a bit further of a walk to the festival grounds.

During the actual sale, as I was used to the main Tomorrowland and I wasn’t super familiar with how to get to Alpe d’Huez, I kept trying to book packages with transportation tickets but the bus and train packages kept getting held in carts from the cities I wanted. Ultimately, I ended up with a 3 person accommodations package for 4 days for 2,991.47€, or 997.16€ per person. This breaks down to: 204€ for the ski pass, 693.16€, I only later realized that the packages with just accommodations were available the whole time. I should have just done that and arranged my own transportation, it would have been more flexible.

Add ons!

You can also buy various add-ons, from meals at the festival to ski and snowboard packages. We got two festival lunches, both up in the ski resort. One was a standard mini-course meal, the other was a fondue lunch. You get a blocked off area where it is only Tomorrowland attendees to eat the special meal. I wouldn’t call them incredibly amazing meals, but they were nice. You can read more about these experiences on the official website.

We got ski equipment packages ahead of time for 82€ euro for a basic set of equipment: skis, boots and poles, or a snowboard and boots. I would not actually recommend this. The equipment at the base level is pretty poor quality, and when you buy a voucher online, the shops are not flexible about letting you switch in between packages. You can actually just book online yourself and have more selection and possibly lower prices with sites like Intersport or Skiset.

This year, we also booked the paragliding experience.

How to get there?

If you got a transportation package, show up at the start point for that and you’ll be taken right to the center of Alpe D’Huez! I picked this option and suffered through an 8 hour bus ride from Paris, and a 10 hour bus ride back. The closest major city is Grenoble, and there is a bus you can book from there. The closest airport is Lyon, and there is a train straight from the airport to Grenoble. There are also buses you can book straight from Lyon Airport, but these sell out quickly.

Transportation Packages

The pickup locations for these were fairly badly communicated. From the cities themselves was more obvious that we should leave from major stations. From Alpe d’Huez it was very badly communicated where the bus pickups were.


Survival tips: accommodations

Being a ski town, most of the accommodations you can book will include a kitchen of some sort, as well as various appliances such as vacuums, heaters, etc. However, they might not come with towels and you might have to rent those for an extra fee. Maybe pack a towel to save a bit of money? There may be no disposable supplies either: there were no salt, pepper, oil, bath supplies, paper towels, and only 1 roll of toilet paper.

Fortunately, there are various supermarkets in town. There’s a Carrefour, a SPAR, as well as a supermarket right in the Centre Bergers.

Also the air gets incredibly dry. For the sake of your respiratory system, some humidifying device would be useful. I ended up continuously boiling water in pots to keep the humidity up. Another tip would be to sleep with a mask on as that traps moisture.

Festival Itself

How the festival works is during the day until about 6pm, the music is up in the ski resort. You can either take the lifts to the stages, or take lifts then ski around the resort to the stages. However, the lifts up close around 3-4pm, so if you really want to see an artist, you should make sure to be on the mountain already by then.

At night, the festival shifts to a festival area with multiple stages as the ski resort is shut down, and goes until about 1-2am. I didn’t find the lineup quite as good as the main Tomorrowland, but still overall good and enjoyable. The later days get the better DJs and also run later.

Overall, Tomorrowland Winter was a really fun experience and I’m looking forward to experiencing it again this year!