Davos & Klosters

Six separate mountains, four railway stations and a bus network that is free with your accommodation card, wrapped around a working municipality of eleven thousand people — the least attractive great ski destination in the Alps, and the one where a car is genuinely dead weight.

A snowboarder carving hard on a Davos piste throws up a wall of powder against a deep blue sky, with gondola cabins and snow-covered peaks beyondPhoto by Mattias Olsson mattiaswolsson, CC0 1.0 · resized

A car is unnecessary

Car-free arrival is practical, daily needs are walkable or transit-served, and at least 80% of the ski areas in this page’s matrix are reachable on published transit during normal ski hours. Verified August 20, 2026.

Ski areas: 10
Within 30 min: 5
Closest: 10 minWalk
Reachable by transit: 10 of 10
Arriving from: Zurich Airport2h 35m by train
Groceries on foot: YesYear-round town

The verdict

Come for plenty of separate skiing on one train ticket. Do not expect a pretty base. Davos has six lift areas and four railway stations inside the destination. Your accommodation card includes the local bus network. A car is dead weight here. Davos is also a working municipality of roughly eleven thousand people, with a hospital, schools, supermarkets and a year-round economy. That makes it unusually livable for a whole season rather than a week.

Do not come for charm. Davos Platz and Davos Dorf are joined by two kilometers of post-war concrete along the Promenade, and altitude does not fix that. Do not come expecting one interconnected ski area either: only Parsenn links Davos to Klosters over the top, and every other mountain means dropping back to the valley floor and taking another train or bus. If you want the postcard, Klosters is twenty minutes up the line — prettier, smaller, and thinner on everything except the skiing.

Is this base for you?

Who this suits

Best for

Car-free skiers who prize variety. Four railway stations and local buses put Parsenn, Jakobshorn, Schatzalp, Rinerhorn and the other valley areas within the same transport system.
Long stays and working winters. Davos has about eleven thousand residents, small-city infrastructure and a high-altitude economy that continues beyond a single resort base.
Families who split their days. Madrisa and Rinerhorn provide family terrain, while Parsenn, Jakobshorn and Pischa give stronger skiers distinct alternatives on the same valley trip.

Depends on you

Davos at 1,560 meters. The altitude preserves snow when lower valleys are gray, but helped produce a long, dense town of sanatorium blocks rather than a compact alpine village.
Six separate mountains. Changing areas is the destination's strength if you like variety, and a train-or-bus reset each time if you want one continuous lift system.
Davos and Klosters. The former supplies a functional town and more evening choices; the latter supplies the recognisable village core but a much smaller range of services.

The honest part

Things you should know

01
Davos is not a village and does not pretend to be one. The town is a two-kilometer ribbon of post-war concrete strung along the Promenade between Davos Platz and Davos Dorf, with a congress center and a hospital in the middle of it. There is no old core to walk to. People who arrive expecting Klosters, or expecting Zermatt, are reliably disappointed on day one.
02
Six mountains is not one ski area. Only Parsenn and Gotschna are lift-linked, and that link is what joins Davos to Klosters; everything else means riding back to the valley floor and catching a train or a bus. Pischa runs a single cable car to marked freeride routes with no groomed pistes, and Schatzalp–Strela has no snowmaking.
03
Mid-January the World Economic Forum takes the town over. Accommodation is booked out and repriced a year in advance, streets around the congress center are fenced and checked, and the local transport pattern changes. It lands squarely in the middle of the season, and Swiss lift and food prices are punishing in the other eleven weeks too.

The access matrix

What you can ski from Davos & Klosters

Typical door-to-lift times in normal winter conditions. ● marks areas reachable on published transit during ski hours. Every row is dated below.

On foot or skis
Public transport
Lift from town
Needs a vehicle

Ski area	Getting there	Time	Best for	Main drawback
Transit-served. JakobshornPrimary	WalkBolgen base in central Davos Platz · ~550 m from the railway station · walk estimated Evidence & assumptions for Jakobshorn The operator places the Bolgen base area "centrally located in Davos Platz", and Davos Klosters Bergbahnen's own address is at the valley station — Brämabüelstrasse 11, Davos Platz. The station sits about 550 m from Davos Platz railway station (measured from OpenStreetMap coordinates); walk time is estimated, not surveyed. Source [6] Jakobshorn — the operator's mountain page — verified August 20, 2026	10 min^[6]	Steeper pitch, the park, and skiing straight out of Davos Platz on foot	A single cable car out of town, so the morning bottleneck is severe on a Saturday
Transit-served. Schatzalp – StrelaLocal	FunicularSchatzalpbahn funicular · every 15 min, evenings to midnight in the core window · 28 Nov–21 Mar Evidence & assumptions for Schatzalp – Strela Schatzalpbahn funicular from the Promenade in Davos Platz (navigation address Promenade 63), about four minutes to Schatzalp, every 15 minutes with evening departures to midnight in the core winter window. Funicular winter period 2026/27: 28 Nov – 21 Mar; the operator's published ski season is still 2025/26 (20 Dec – 29 Mar). Walk to the valley station is estimated. Source [7] Schatzalpbahn funicular — timetable, fares and night service — verified August 20, 2026	12 min^[7]	Quiet, sunny, unhurried skiing with a funicular that runs until midnight	No snowmaking, so in a thin winter check whether the pistes are open at all
Transit-served. Davos Nordic (Flüelatal loipe)Local · nordic	WalkLanglaufzentrum on Hertistrasse · trails open 08:00–17:00 · paid Loipenpass required Evidence & assumptions for Davos Nordic (Flüelatal loipe) Langlaufzentrum Davos on Hertistrasse, walkable from Davos Platz. Trails are officially open 08:00–17:00, and since winter 2024/25 they require a paid Loipenpass (day pass CHF 9–10; free under 16). Walk time estimated. Source [8] Langlaufen in Davos Klosters — trail hours, network and Loipenpass prices — verified August 20, 2026	15 min^[8]	Classic and skating on the Flüelatal World Cup trails from the middle of town	Valley-floor tracks are the first thing a föhn thaw destroys, and the loipe closes at 17:00
Transit-served. ParsennPrimary	TrainWalk + RhB to Davos Dorf, then ~300 m to the Parsennbahn · not timetable-verified Evidence & assumptions for Parsenn ESTIMATED door-to-lift from central Davos Platz — roughly 5 min walk, 3–4 min on the RhB to Davos Dorf, then about 300 m to the Parsennbahn valley station. Not timetable-verified. Klosters-based skiers use the Gotschnabahn from Klosters Platz instead. Source [1] Davos Dorf station — services and facilities — verified August 16, 2026	20 min^[1]	Long top-to-bottom descents and the only over-the-top link to Klosters	The one area everybody uses, so the Parsennbahn absorbs the 09:00 queue for the whole valley
Transit-served. RinerhornLocal	TrainRhB to Davos Glaris, gondola across the road · free with the Davos guest card Evidence & assumptions for Rinerhorn RhB to Davos Glaris; the gondola is across the road. Covered by the Davos guest card on the Davos Laret – Davos Glaris section. Night operation Wed and Fri 19:00–22:30. Ride time estimated. Source [2] Rhaetian Railway — network and services — verified August 16, 2026	20 min^[2]	Families, and the valley's only night skiing and night tobogganing	Low, small and north-facing at the base; the valley run is the first to go thin
Transit-served. PischaLocal	Public busPischabus 90.305 from Davos Dorf · every 30–45 min · 26 Dec–23 Mar (2024/25 table) Evidence & assumptions for Pischa VBD's Pischabus (line 90.305) shuttles between Davos Dorf — the Seehofseeli stop by the Parsenn valley station, then the railway station — and the Pischa valley station in the Dörfji, a 13–15 minute bus leg. The posted timetable (winter 2024/25, still the current file) ran 26 Dec – 23 Mar every 30–45 minutes, first bus 08:00, last return 16:45. Total time from central Davos is estimated. Source [10] Line 90.305 Davos Seehofseeli – Davos Dorf – Davos Pischabahn (Pischabus) — timetable — verified August 20, 2026	35 min^[10]	Marked freeride descents and ski touring away from groomed terrain	One cable car and marked routes only — no groomed pistes, so it is useless as an ordinary ski day
Transit-served. MadrisaLocal	TrainRhB to Klosters Dorf · station ~50 m from the Madrisabahn · time estimated Evidence & assumptions for Madrisa The Madrisabahn valley station is roughly 50 m from Klosters Dorf railway station (verified against OpenStreetMap addressing). Total door-to-lift time is ESTIMATED from RhB line structure, not from a checked timetable. Source [3] Klosters Dorf station — services and facilities — verified August 16, 2026	45 min^[3]	Families and sun, and the reason to look at Klosters as a base at all	Three-quarters of an hour each way from Davos Platz, and outside the Davos guest card's free rail zone
Transit-served. Darlux – BergünDay trip	TrainRhB via Filisur to Bergün, then bus or walk up · neither leg timetable-verified Evidence & assumptions for Darlux – Bergün ESTIMATED: Davos Platz – Filisur – Bergün on the RhB, then a local bus or a walk up to the Darlux chairlift. Neither leg is timetable-verified here. Source [2] Rhaetian Railway — network and services — verified August 16, 2026	1h 20m^[2]	A cheap, empty day on the Albula line with a toboggan run home	A change at Filisur plus a climb from Bergün station to the chairlift, for only about 20 km of piste
Transit-served. Corviglia (St. Moritz)Excursion	TrainRhB via Filisur and Samedan, then the Chantarella funicular · connections not verified Evidence & assumptions for Corviglia (St. Moritz) ESTIMATED: Davos Platz – Filisur – Samedan – St. Moritz on the RhB, then the Chantarella funicular from St. Moritz Dorf. Connection times not verified. Source [2] Rhaetian Railway — network and services — verified August 16, 2026	1h 55m^[2]	High, sunny, big-mountain terrain in a completely different valley	Close to two hours each way, a separate lift pass, and Engadin prices on top
Transit-served. Arosa LenzerheideExcursion	TrainRhB to Chur then the Arosa line · PostBus to Lenzerheide somewhat shorter · unverified Evidence & assumptions for Arosa Lenzerheide ESTIMATED: Davos Platz – Chur on the RhB, then the Arosa line. The Lenzerheide side via PostBus from Chur is somewhat shorter. Neither routing is timetable-verified here. Source [2] Rhaetian Railway — network and services — verified August 16, 2026	2h 35m^[2]	The linked Arosa–Lenzerheide domain, on one pass for both	Two and a half hours each way via Chur; it eats the whole day and costs a second lift ticket

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 kilometers 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 center, 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 meters 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 program 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 caliber 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 authorization 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 meters 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 gray.

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 kilometers without ever becoming a square.

Klosters, twenty minutes down the line, is what visitors expect Davos to be — timber, a church, a compact center, 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.

Sourcing note. Rail rows in the matrix above cite the registered Rhaetian Railway station and network records, and the mobility claims cite the destination’s registered guest-card and getting-there records. The Jakobshorn, Schatzalp, Langlaufzentrum and Pischa rows cite operator records verified 2026-08-20 — Davos Klosters Bergbahnen, the Schatzalpbahn, the municipal and destination cross-country pages, and the VBD Pischabus timetable. The Pischabus file the operator links is still the winter 2024/25 edition, so its clock times need a fresh pull each season. Transfer times marked ESTIMATED in the matrix notes have not been checked against an SBB or VBD timetable.

Not sure?

Choose somewhere else if…

Innsbruck
You want a proper city rather than a working town — university, cheap beds, late trains, somewhere to be on a storm day — and you accept that every ski area is a bus ride out of the valley rather than a lift from the middle of town.
Bad Gastein
You want the same formula — a rail-served spa town with a sanatorium past, several separate mountains and a real year-round population — at Austrian prices. The lift network is smaller and parts of the town are visibly unrestored, but the arithmetic on a season is far kinder.
Jungfrau Region
Scenery is a large part of what you are paying for. Grindelwald, Wengen and Mürren give you a car-free rail-served valley that looks the way people imagine Switzerland looks — for less skiing per franc, thicker crowds on the Kleine Scheidegg side, and no town underneath it.

Sources & data notes

How this page was verified

Section verification

Access matrixAugust 16, 2026
Getting thereAugust 16, 2026
Getting aroundAugust 16, 2026
Where to stayAugust 16, 2026

Sources

Davos Dorf station — services and facilities — Rhätische Bahn / Rhaetian Railway (RhB) · official operator page, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 16, 2026
Rhaetian Railway — network and services — Rhätische Bahn / Rhaetian Railway (RhB) · official operator page, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 16, 2026
Klosters Dorf station — services and facilities — Rhätische Bahn / Rhaetian Railway (RhB) · official operator page, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 16, 2026
Getting there — rail, local buses and evening on-demand service — Destination Davos Klosters · DMO site, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 16, 2026
Premium Card (guest card) — terms for overnight guests — Destination Davos Klosters · DMO site, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 16, 2026
Jakobshorn — the operator's mountain page — Davos Klosters Bergbahnen AG · operator page, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 20, 2026
Schatzalpbahn funicular — timetable, fares and night service — Berghotel Schatzalp (Schatzalpbahn) · operator timetable, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 20, 2026
Langlaufen in Davos Klosters — trail hours, network and Loipenpass prices — Destination Davos Klosters · DMO site, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 20, 2026
Langlauf / Ski nordisch — municipal trail operation and the Loipenpass decision — Gemeinde Davos · municipal page, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 20, 2026
Line 90.305 Davos Seehofseeli – Davos Dorf – Davos Pischabahn (Pischabus) — timetable — Verkehrsbetrieb der Landschaft Davos (VBD); PDF hosted by Davos Klosters Bergbahnen AG · operator timetable, cited not reproduced · retrieved August 20, 2026
Northeast resort profiles — NESKIS · sibling property; mountain specifications maintained there · retrieved August 16, 2026

Images

Photo by Mattias Olsson mattiaswolsson, licensed under CC0 1.0

Page last reviewed August 16, 2026. Transit routes, schedules and fares change between seasons — check the operator before you travel. Mountain specifications for the northeastern US are maintained separately on NESKIS.