Davos & Klosters

Where to stay

The first decision is not Davos versus Klosters. It is Davos Platz versus Davos Dorf, and it is more consequential than it looks on a map. The two are a couple of kilometres apart along one Promenade, each has its own railway station, and each puts a different mountain on your doorstep.

Davos Platz is the administrative and commercial half: the congress centre, the hospital, the main supermarkets, most of the restaurants, and the Jakobshorn cable car about ten minutes’ walk from the station. It is also where the Schatzalp funicular leaves from. If you want to ski without using transport at all on at least some days, stay here.

Davos Dorf is quieter, marginally more pleasant to look at, and sits underneath the Parsennbahn — which matters, because Parsenn is the mountain you will ski most. The cost is that everything else, including most of the evening options, is a bus or a three-minute train ride away. Choose Dorf if Parsenn is the point of the trip; choose Platz if the town is.

Klosters Platz is the pretty one, and it is honest to say so. A recognisable village core, the Gotschnabahn straight up to Parsenn from the station, and a much smaller commercial strip. What you give up is scale: fewer shops, fewer places to eat midweek in March, and a longer trip to four of the six mountains. Klosters Dorf, one stop further north, trades even that for immediate access to Madrisa — the gondola station is about fifty metres from the platform.

The side valleys — Sertig, Dischma, Monstein, Davos Glaris — are for people staying a month, not a week. Glaris is the exception worth naming: it is on the railway, it is under the Rinerhorn gondola, and it is the cheapest bed in the destination.

Getting there

Zurich Airport to Davos is a rail journey of roughly two and a half hours with one change, normally at Landquart, where you leave the SBB network for the Rhaetian Railway. Published journey times cluster between 2h20 and 2h40 depending on the connection. There is no airport transfer to book and no reason to hire a car at the terminal.

The destination has four stations: Klosters Dorf, Klosters Platz, Davos Dorf and Davos Platz. All four are inside walking distance of lodging, and two of them are inside walking distance of a lift. This is the single fact that separates Davos from most Alpine destinations of comparable size — arrival is not a transfer problem, it is a train ticket.

From within Switzerland the same line runs from Landquart via Klosters; the Vereina car-carrying tunnel from Klosters to Sagliains is the winter route from the Engadin.

Getting around

Local buses in Davos and Klosters are free with the guest card issued at check-in by your accommodation, and the card also covers second-class Rhaetian Railway travel within the local fare zones. For a Davos-based guest that means free rail on the Davos Laret – Davos Glaris section, which is enough to reach Rinerhorn and Parsenn without buying anything. For a Klosters-based guest it covers Saas – Davos Platz. Note the asymmetry: a Davos guest heading to Madrisa at Klosters Dorf is outside their free zone and buys a ticket.

What the free bus network does not do is join the mountains together. Only Parsenn and Gotschna are lift-linked. Every other combination — Jakobshorn to Rinerhorn, Rinerhorn to Madrisa — means skiing to the valley, walking to a station or a stop, and riding. It works, it is punctual, and it costs nothing extra, but it takes a chunk out of a ski day and it is the main reason the six-area pass flatters the place on paper.

Evening transport is real but thinner than the daytime network. The Schatzalp funicular runs to midnight, and the Rinerhorn night-skiing programme on Wednesdays and Fridays depends on evening trains to Davos Glaris. Exact last services on the VBD bus lines are not verified here and should be checked before anyone plans a season around them.

Who it suits

• Skiers who want variety without a car. This is the strongest case. Ten distinct places to ski in this guide, every one of them reachable on published transit, most of them included in a card you are handed at check-in.
• Long stays and working winters. Davos is a functioning municipality of about eleven thousand people with a hospital, schools, supermarkets and an economy that does not fold in April. Very few ski destinations of this calibre are also ordinary places to live.
• Families splitting up during the day. Madrisa and Rinerhorn are genuinely family mountains; Jakobshorn and Parsenn are not. The transport network makes a split day workable.

It suits short-trip skiers chasing atmosphere least. If you have four days and you want the evening to feel like a holiday, the Promenade will not deliver it, and Klosters — while much prettier — is a small village with a correspondingly small range of options.

Living for a season

Davos is one of the more plausible places in the Alps to spend a whole winter as an adult with a job. The hospital, the schools, the research institutes and the congress economy mean there is year-round employment that is not a lift ticket, and there are shops open in November. Klosters is not the same proposition: it is a resort village first.

Two warnings. Switzerland is not in the EU, so work authorisation is a real obstacle for non-EU and non-EFTA nationals and should be settled before anything else. And the housing market here is not assessed in this guide — Davos has the same second-home and seasonal-staff pressures as every Swiss resort municipality, but we have no current, citable figure, so treat any rental estimate you are given as unverified.

What the town is like

Davos sits at about 1,560 metres and is routinely billed as the highest town in Europe; that particular superlative is a marketing line we could not confirm against an authoritative source, but the altitude is real and it is why the snow holds here when lower valleys are grey.

The altitude is also why the town exists in its present form. Davos was built as a tuberculosis cure resort in the nineteenth century — the sanatoriums that gave Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain are still visible as long white buildings above the valley, one of which is the Schatzalp hotel you ride the funicular to. When the cure economy collapsed, the buildings became hotels and clinics and the town kept expanding along the valley floor. The result is a place with the infrastructure of a small city and the appearance of an airport perimeter road: flat-roofed blocks, a four-lane approach, and a Promenade that goes on for two kilometres without ever becoming a square.

Klosters, twenty minutes down the line, is what visitors expect Davos to be — timber, a church, a compact centre, and a long association with the British royal family that it wears lightly. The two are on the same lift pass and the same railway, and the honest summary of this destination is that you get to choose between a functional town that is not beautiful and a beautiful village that is not a town.

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Sourcing note. Every row in the access matrix above currently cites neskis_resort_profiles because the source registry does not yet contain Swiss sources. The underlying claims were checked against Davos Klosters Bergbahnen, Klosters-Madrisa Bergbahnen, Schatzalp, the Davos Klosters guest card terms and OpenStreetMap coordinates; those need to be added to sources.json and the sourceId values replaced before this page can move off draft. Transfer times marked ESTIMATED in the matrix notes have not been checked against an SBB or VBD timetable.