St. Moritz Travel Guide: Hotels, Restaurants & Things to Do (2026)

St. Moritz has been selling winter to visitors longer than anywhere else on earth, and it shows in the best and worst ways. The village is genuinely glamorous, the mountains are enormous and the lake turns into a racecourse in February. It is also expensive, steeply built, and closed for large parts of the year in ways nobody tells you until you arrive. This guide is written for first-time visitors trying to work out where to base themselves, repeat visitors who want the places that are not inside a hotel, families balancing skiing against a swimming pool, and anyone considering the shoulder season without realizing what that means here.

Geographically, treat St. Moritz as the hub of the Upper Engadin rather than a standalone resort, because good trips cross village boundaries constantly. St. Moritz Dorf is the hillside center: Via Serlas, the luxury shopping, most of the headline hotels. St. Moritz Bad sits lower and flatter by the lake, with the Signal cable car, the public pool and better value. Suvretta is a quiet pocket west of town with its own mountain access. Champfèr is the calmer village toward Silvaplana. Beyond those, Celerina has its own way onto the same mountain, Silvaplana and Surlej are the base for Corvatsch and the windsurfing lake, Pontresina is closer to the glaciers, and Sils, Zuoz, Samedan and Maloja are each a short train or bus ride up and down the valley.

Three rules shape a trip here more than anything else. Dorf is steep, so the hotel that looks close to the station may not be a walk with ski bags. The valley has two hard shoulder seasons, roughly early October to early December and the weeks after Easter through to early June, when a large share of the hotels and restaurants simply shut. And February is both the school-holiday peak and the event peak at the same time, which makes it the hardest and most expensive fortnight of the year.

Best for: ski trips, luxury weekends, multi-generation families, couples, outdoor travelers, and event-driven winter trips built around the frozen lake.

Best time to visit: early December to early April for winter, mid-June to mid-October for summer. Corvatsch and Diavolezza keep skiing several weeks after the town has largely closed.

Ideal trip length: four to five nights in winter, three to four in summer. Five to seven if you are skiing most days or adding several Upper Engadin excursions.

Do you need a car? No, for most trips. Trains, Engadin buses and mountain railways cover the valley well, and public transport is included for overnight guests from the second night in summer. A car helps for big grocery runs and remote trailheads.

Best area for a first visit: St. Moritz Dorf, for the concentration of hotels, restaurants and shops. Choose Bad if you want flatter ground, the pool and better value.

What to book first: peak-week hotels, then destination dinners, then popular mountain lunches, then ski instruction. Bob run passenger rides open months ahead and are limited.

The thing that catches people out: the two funiculars from St. Moritz Dorf up to Corviglia are closed for a full rebuild that began in summer 2026, with no published reopening date. Access to the mountain is currently via the Signal cable car from St. Moritz Bad, a shuttle bus, and the Piz Nair cable car. Check with Engadin St. Moritz Mountains before you book a Dorf hotel on the strength of its walk to the funicular.

Start with the funicular closure. Both sections of the St. Moritz Dorf to Chantarella to Corviglia funicular came out of service in summer 2026 for technical renewal and a barrier-free rebuild of all three stations. The operator says work will run for several months and has not published a reopening date. Corviglia is also the only mountain in the region whose winter operating dates were still unpublished at the time of writing, which may be related. Nothing about this makes a St. Moritz trip unworkable, but it changes which side of town is convenient, and it is worth one phone call before booking.

Rail is the easy default. From Zurich main station, allow about three and a half hours with one change at Chur, and closer to four hours door to door from Zurich airport. The final stretch runs the Albula line, which along with the Bernina line is UNESCO-listed. There is no direct train. The station sits below Dorf and most hotels arrange transfers, which is worth taking with luggage.

Flying. Zurich is the sensible arrival airport for anyone coming from the US, with Milan working for some itineraries. Engadin Airport at Samedan is the region own airfield and it has no scheduled commercial service at all: private aviation, air taxis, scenic flights and heli-skiing only. There is no scheduled airport shuttle from Zurich or Milan either, so it is the train or a private transfer.

Driving. Switzerland requires an annual motorway vignette, sold as a sticker or now as an e-vignette tied to the number plate, and there is no daily or weekly version. Winter tires are not legally mandatory in Switzerland, which surprises people, but the law requires you to keep control of the vehicle and your insurer can decline a claim if you could not. The year-round road approach is over the Julier Pass. The Albula Pass, despite sharing a name with the rail line and the tunnel, is a summer scenic road and is not the winter route. The Vereina car-carrying train from Klosters into the Engadin exists if you would rather not drive a pass at all. There is no longer a car train over the Albula; that service ended after the 2011 winter.

Getting around once here. Engadin Bus, PostAuto and the Rhaetian Railway connect every village in this guide. Overnight guests get public transport included from their second night, and a summer program includes most of the region mountain railways for guests of participating hotels from the second night as well. The exact winter position on the free-transport benefit is worth confirming with your hotel, since the official page is framed around summer.

Crossing the border. Switzerland is in the Schengen area but not the EU, and both halves of that matter. The EU Entry/Exit System is now fully live and Switzerland takes part, so US visitors are registered biometrically at their first Schengen entry and passports are no longer stamped. Nothing needs doing in advance. ETIAS has not started yet; check the official site before you travel rather than trusting a date. Everything is priced in Swiss francs, not euros. Switzerland sits outside the EU roaming zone, so a plan or eSIM sold as covering Europe often does not cover it. US health insurance generally does not travel here, and in a mountain destination the number worth saving is 1414 for Rega air rescue alongside the general 112.

A note on the language. German is the working language, Italian is a strong second presence, and Romansh survives as a minority language with its own Upper Engadin dialect. The street names are Romansh rather than Italian, which confuses people: Via is a street, Plazza a square, Chesa a house. English is spoken throughout the resort.

When to go. Winter runs from early December to early April in town, with Corvatsch typically going to late April and Diavolezza to early May. Summer runs from mid-June to mid-October, with the fullest choice of lifts and restaurants from late June to early September. The two shoulder gaps are real and severe: roughly early October to early December, and the week after Easter until early June. February is the busiest and most expensive month by a wide margin, running close to double the overnight stays of a strong summer month, because Swiss school holidays are staggered across the whole month and the frozen-lake events land inside them.

A large share of this valley is apartments and chalets rather than hotels, and for a family week that is often the better answer. What follows is the hotel picture, and the single most important thing about it is seasonality: six of the grand houses close for months at a time, and one never opens in summer at all. The genuinely year-round hotels are worth knowing precisely because they are the exception.

Dorf gives you walkability and nightlife at the highest prices. Bad gives you flatter ground, the pool and better value. Suvretta and Champfèr trade convenience for quiet. Celerina, Surlej, Pontresina and Sils are all worth considering if you would rather have a village than a resort, and all four are on the train or bus network. One thing to say plainly: there is no mid-market hotel tier in St. Moritz Dorf. Below the four-stars, the honest options are the youth hostel, Hotel Bären, the Laudinella group properties in Bad, and the campsite.

The thing to understand before you book anything: most restaurants in St. Moritz belong to a hotel. Twenty-six of the thirty-odd food and drink options in this guide sit inside a property in the section above, and Badrutt's Palace alone accounts for eight of them. That is not a reason to avoid them, but it is worth knowing that the independent restaurant scene is smaller than the length of this section suggests, and that the genuinely independent rooms are mostly down in St. Moritz Bad or a short train ride away.

Seasonality matters more here than in any destination we have written up. Several of the best rooms are winter only, including two of the three serious tasting menus. If you are coming in summer, read the season notes before you plan an evening.

Mountain lunch is a real part of a St. Moritz day rather than a sandwich in a lift queue, and the range runs from a champagne terrace to a hut that has been feeding skiers since 1903. Book the popular ones before a bluebird weekend, and build lunch around the ski route rather than crisscrossing the mountain to reach it. Several of these are reachable by cable car without skis, which is how non-skiers join the day.

Curated rather than exhaustive. Two of these are more than a hundred years old, one is genuinely useful at seven in the morning when nothing else is open, and one is a coffee roastery up the valley in Zuoz that is worth a trip in its own right.

Nightlife here is unusual in that almost all of it belongs to a hotel. Of the bars below, only three are independent, and one of those is a private members club. There is very little slope-side après in the St. Moritz sense, and the best of what exists is over on Corvatsch rather than above the town. If you want a room where nobody is performing, the list is short and it is at the end of this section.

Two of these are sporting institutions that exist nowhere else, three are events that take over the frozen lake for a weekend at a time, and several of the museums close for longer than they open. Check seasons before building a day around any of them.

Three separate companies run the skiing here, but a single regional ticket covers them, and the region uses dynamic pricing, so buying ahead is meaningfully cheaper than buying at the lift. Tickets are still sold on the day at lift stations. There are nine or ten ski areas depending on how you count the small village lifts, and the published regional figure is over 350 kilometers of runs.

The valley floor is as much of the appeal as the summits, and a good trip usually mixes the two. Everything below is reachable by train or bus, and most of it works in both seasons: the lake paths are cleared in winter, and the cross-country network turns the same ground into something completely different.

The valley is unusually well served here, and one operator in particular does the thing that makes a car-free trip work: it delivers to your hotel. Ski school, mountain guides, sailing, kitesurfing and horse-drawn sleighs are all covered; snowmobiling and dog sledding are not, because neither could be confirmed as operating in the Engadin.

The single most useful thing to know: Migros sells no alcohol at all, anywhere in Switzerland, and the biggest supermarket in the valley is a Migros. If you are stocking an apartment, plan the drink separately from the food. Coop sells beer, wine and spirits; so does the station convenience store; Denner is the cheap option for spirits. Swiss law sets sixteen for beer and wine and eighteen for spirits.

Via Maistra and Via Serlas carry the luxury flagships, and they are the same flagships as everywhere else. What follows is the part that is specific to here.

Everything below is reachable on the train or a short drive, and three of the four make a comfortable half day. The Bernina line in particular is worth a full day rather than a squeezed morning.