a few days after booking a stay last December at Chetzeron, a mountaintop luxury hotel in Switzerland’s Crans-Montana, I received an e-mail from my host, Sami Lamaa, introducing me to a friend of his who was traveling to Vail for the first time and asking if I might show her around.  So the day after Christmas, I treated Cassandra Levene, managing director of a boutique real estate firm that specializes in Swiss Alps ski properties, to the house specialty at Larkspur (little did I know that would be the last time I’d feast on a Larkburger,  now that the Golden Peak culinary landmark has been replaced by a trendy Front Range food hall.

 A few weeks later when my wife (Red Cliff artist Helen Hiebert) and  I arrived in Crans-Montana two hours early for our snowcat transfer to Chetzeron, Levene welcomed us with Champagne and hors d’oeuvres at her family’s ski chalet while we waited. Then she traveled with her mother, Yolanda, up to Chetzeron the next evening to dine with us and help navigate the French menu, and to suggest restaurants and places to stay in Andermatt, the next stop on our Swiss ski tour. Before we left town for Andermatt the next morning, Lamaa arranged for us to have coffee with another friend, Agneta Kane, a former Vail Mountain ski instructor who owns a chalet with a lockoff apartment that serves as a home away from home for Vail Mountain ski instructors visiting Crans-Montana, where I also am now welcome to stay next time I visit.

Nothing against Crans-Montana, but I had such a superlative experience skiing in Andermatt that I decided to return in February to ski with my daughter for a week while she is on winter break from a teaching gig in Germany as a Fulbright scholar. Since most of the hotels in Andermatt’s historic village center were already sold out (bookings by American Epic Pass holders like me have surged sixfold since Vail Resorts assumed ownership of Andermatt in 2021), I found a place on Airbnb that not only was available (and surprisingly affordable), but also was ranked in the top 1 percent of all Airbnb rentals in the entire world, as was my Superhost, a guy named Igi.

Via the Airbnb messaging app, I introduced myself as a journalist who traveled to Andermatt last winter to interview Mike Goar (the former COO of Park City who now oversees all of Vail Resorts’ Swiss holdings) and was returning to visit the resort off the clock this time and relax on a genuine ski vacation. Turns out Goar is the boss of my Airbnb host, Ignaz Zopp, general manager of Andermatt-Sedrun Sport AG (so on my next visit to Andermatt  I will be staying in the home of the Swiss equivalent of Beth Howard). As it happens, two weeks after I return from Andermatt, Zopp arrives in Vail for his ski vacation. In the spirit of international exchange, I offered to be my Swiss host’s host when he skis my home mountains. Which is to say that when it comes to living in and traveling to ski towns, it truly is a small world.