A regular at Guarda Golf once decided to test a theory. He had noticed that Nati Felli, who founded the hotel and still lives on the property, never seemed to say no. So he asked for a fresh live lobster. In Crans-Montana. Fifteen hundred meters up a mountain, in a landlocked country, more than two hundred kilometers from the nearest salt water.

She found two. As far as anyone could establish, they were the only two live lobsters available in the region that day. They arrived at his table.

Personal is the standard promise in this category. At Guarda Golf the word carries consequences.

What the rankings miss

The credentials are substantial. In 2026, "Die 101 Besten" by Carsten K. Rath ranked Guarda Golf second in its Luxury Lifestyle Hotels and Resorts category. The MICHELIN Guide awards it Two Keys. It belongs to both The Leading Hotels of the World and Swiss Deluxe Hotels.

Other Alpine hotels hold comparable honours. The number that separates Guarda Golf is the return rate, which the hotel puts at 68 percent. A hotel can buy a spa and hire a chef. It cannot buy a guest choosing the same room in the same valley for an eighth consecutive year.

The effect on the room is easy to feel. With that proportion of the house returning, the lounge behaves less like a lobby than a club, and the regulars are not difficult to find. When we asked why this hotel rather than the many others they could afford anywhere in the Alps, several of them, unprompted and in separate conversations, reached for the same phrase. It makes you feel special.

The family upstairs

Nati Felli's route to Swiss hospitality began in Brazil, where she founded both a school and a restaurant at eighteen. She later trained at Les Roches, the hotel management school five minutes down the road, the decision that eventually anchored her to this plateau. She opened Guarda Golf in 2009 with her husband, Giancarlo Felli. The family never moved out. They live on the property, and their daughter Giulia, who grew up in the building, now runs sales, marketing and public relations alongside General Manager Simon Schenk.

The arrangement is difficult to imitate. The hosts have to live with the result, which produces a quality of attention a management contract cannot reproduce.

The staff tells the same story. Seasonal hotels struggle to retain people, because the work ends when the snow does and the good ones go elsewhere. Guarda Golf's team returns season after season, and it shows in the way they talk about the building, as something of theirs rather than somewhere they have been posted.

The building

Nati and Giancarlo Felli designed the hotel themselves. The exterior keeps to traditional Valaisan construction, timber and stone beneath deep eaves, so the building settles into the hillside rather than announcing itself against it. The interiors are contemporary and light, which is the harder half of the brief. The timber frames the view rather than competing with it.

The hotel is deliberately small, twenty-nine keys in total: twenty-three rooms and suites, five of them junior suites and most south-facing with private balconies, plus six Suite Apartments. Interiors are residential rather than hotel-like: antique solid wood furniture, bathrooms tiled in Italian limestone, Bulgari toiletries. Every room is individually designed, which means the house cannot be experienced identically twice.

The property's second act is what its name promises. The Suite Apartments run 225 square meters each and sleep up to six, with up to three bedrooms, a private living room with a gas fireplace, a dining area, a fully enclosed kitchen with its own service entrance, and a terrace framed by the Alps. Two adjoining apartments can be booked together as a private floor, creating a six-bedroom alpine residence. Suite Apartment stays include daily breakfast, twice-daily housekeeping, porter and valet service, private transfers around Crans-Montana, and access to a private lounge. A private chef, a pre-arrival shopping service, and cots and high chairs are available on request.

Golf, from the door

The nine-hole Jack Nicklaus course begins in front of the hotel. Not a shuttle ride, not a drive. Guests watch play from their balconies and reach the first tee on foot in the time it takes to cross a lawn. On a golf trip, where transfer time is the usual tax, that is close to the ideal arrangement, and the Alps standing over every hole does the rest.

It was contracted in 1981 and opened for play in the summer of 1988, and the club calls it Nicklaus's first in Switzerland and counts four occasions on which it has been named the most beautiful nine holes in the country. It is exacting rather than long, and it asks for accuracy rather than power.

A few minutes' walk away is the Severiano Ballesteros course at Golf Club Crans-sur-Sierre, which has hosted the same tournament since 1939, as the Swiss Open until 1983 and as the Omega European Masters since 2001. The 2026 edition runs from 3 to 6 September, and Guarda Golf guests are within walking distance of every round. Three more 18-hole courses sit a short drive away at Sierre, Sion and Leuk. The hotel keeps two private golf carts, a chip and putt area, a secure golf room with valet service, and handles green fees, lessons and transfers at reception.

The Levant, at altitude

At Restaurant FIVE, the hotel's main dining room, the register is Levantine rather than alpine, which is the last thing you expect at 1,500 meters and the best argument for eating in. The name comes from five foundations: a generous welcome, convivial sharing, respect for nature's produce, a contemporary interpretation of flavours, and the culinary heritage of the Levant. Meals open with authentic Levantine mezze served for the table, move through Mediterranean favourites, and close with pastry work that holds its own against the view. FIVE opens the day as well, with a breakfast buffet.

The Guarda Golf Lounge runs all day and serves food from 11am, with international classics by the fireplace and an oyster and caviar menu each winter. Afternoon tea is served here too, a list of specialty teas and infusions, the pastry alongside them from the same kitchen that closes dinner. Les Alpes Bar handles the cocktail hours at either end of dinner.

On Sundays the hotel lays on the Grand Sunday Buffet, the gourmet event of the week in Crans-Montana. It runs to an array of dishes and seasonal creations, presented as carefully as anything that leaves the kitchen at dinner, and finishes on a long table of desserts. The only difficulty is deciding where to start.

Six hundred meters, twenty-nine keys

The Guarda Golf Spa runs to 600 square meters. It holds a heated indoor pool, a separate whirlpool, a sauna and steam room, a private terrace for summer sunbathing, and a Technogym-equipped fitness room with an indoor golf practice area attached. There are four treatment rooms including a VIP Suite for couples with its own whirlpool and hammam.

Six hundred meters serving twenty-nine keys is why the spa works. It arranges itself around a guest's day rather than the reverse, and we never found the booking sheet to be the constraint. Treatments draw on two houses: La Colline, the Swiss brand whose facials are offered in no other spa in Switzerland, and KOS Paris, which sources raw and organic ingredients. The hotel says its tailor-made Health and Balance Programme is offered nowhere else.

Winter, and where downhill began

Crans-Montana holds a stronger claim on skiing history than most resorts that advertise one. In 1911 an Austrian shoemaker living here gave a ski lesson to an English visitor, Captain Hoppenmeyer, in what local accounts treat as the beginning of ski instruction on the plateau. That same year the Roberts of Kandahar Challenge Cup ran from the Wildstrubel hut down to Montana, organised by Sir Arnold Lunn, the British pioneer of modern alpine skiing and the inventor of the slalom. It is often cited as the first downhill ski race in the history of the sport, though Lilienfeld and Kitzbühel hold earlier claims. Skiing as a thing raced down a mountain rather than travelled across one began, in large part, here.

The modern version delivers 140 kilometers of slopes on 24 lifts, rising from 1,500 meters to the Plaine-Morte glacier at 3,000, plus around 20 kilometers of cross-country trails. The hotel offers ski-in ski-out access onto 16 kilometers of those cross-country trails, a short walk from the village center. Guests receive complimentary private transfers to the lifts, ski passes at reception, a secure ski room with boot warmer, and a ski butler through the season.

The resort's profile has risen since Vail Resorts took a majority stake in the mountain operations and brought Crans-Montana onto the Epic Pass. In February 2027 the plateau hosts the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships for both men and women.

The plateau, and the valley below

The skiing and the golf are what most people book for. They are not the whole of the plateau. Crans-Montana is a certified Family Destination, with a Snow Island on the golf course in winter, a Snow Garden for beginners, a lantern-path treasure hunt, and a ropes-course Fun Forest in summer. Summer also brings mountain biking, paragliding, hiking to the Colombire hamlet and swimming at Moubra lake. The Fondation Opale is the cultural standout, a contemporary gallery whose program centers on Australian Aboriginal art. Shopping runs along Rue du Prado, where Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Loro Piana, Chopard and Patek Philippe sit within a few minutes of one another.

That is a full week without once leaving the plateau, which is what most visitors do. The one addition we would make is a day below. The Rhône valley under the funicular is where almost none of them go, and three things down there are worth the ride.

Sion. Give it a full day. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the country and a working town rather than a resort. Two hills rise from the middle of it, each carrying a castle. Tourbillon is the ruin, and the climb is short, steep and worth it for the view back down the valley. Valère is the one to prioritise: a fortified church holding the swallow's-nest organ built around 1435, widely billed as the oldest playable organ in the world. Time a visit to the International Valère Organ Festival and you can hear an instrument from the reign of Henry VI played in the room it was built for. Below the two hills the old town takes an easy afternoon on foot.

The underground lake at Saint-Léonard. Sitting between Sion and Sierre, which is to say at the foot of your own funicular, is the largest natural navigable underground lake in Europe, around 260 meters long, the water at a constant 11 degrees. You see it from a rowboat on a thirty-minute guided tour, in near silence apart from the oars, and the acoustics are the reason to go. Admission is about twelve francs. Book ahead and bring a layer.

Valais wine. The valley below the balcony is Switzerland's largest wine region, responsible for roughly a third of national production, with vineyards terraced along more than 100 kilometers of the Rhône between 270 and 1,100 meters. There are around 350 producers, most of them small, and under two percent of Swiss wine is exported, which makes tasting on the spot close to the only way to drink Petite Arvine, Cornalin and Humagne Rouge. A half day of cellar visits below Sion is the easiest way to spend an afternoon off the mountain.

Further afield, day trips reach Gruyères, Chillon Castle and Zermatt.

Getting there

Geneva is roughly two hours away by road, Zurich and Milan about three and a half, Lausanne an hour and a half. Sion airport is 30 kilometers from the hotel. The most pleasurable arrival is by train to Sierre, where a funicular fully renewed in 2022 climbs 927 meters to the plateau in 13 minutes. Helicopters land at Chermignon, ten minutes away by car. The hotel will arrange the airport leg itself as a private transfer, arranged through reception and billed separately. Once you are on the plateau, private transfers around Crans-Montana are included in the rate, which covers most of the reasons you would otherwise want a car.

Why it holds

The property can be taken privately, 42 bedrooms and three dining rooms at once. There is a fifteen-seat cinema named for Sir Roger Moore, a library worth an evening, a cigar lounge. These are the things a hotel of this class is measured on, and Guarda Golf has all of them.

The lobster is the part that cannot be specified in advance. Neither can a family still living above the shop, a staff that keeps returning, or a house largely filled with people who have quietly settled on where they go. What the hotel sells is a stay. What it produces is somewhere to return to, which is the harder thing to build, and the only thing that accounts for the 68 percent.