Lucerne is a city on a lake, not a ski resort, and the honest way to describe it is as a base. It sits at 435 m on Lake Lucerne, with the covered Chapel Bridge, the old town and the concert hall, and the mountains begin within an hour of the station.
How to get there: Zurich airport is a little over an hour away by direct train. Lucerne is one of the principal stations in Switzerland, with frequent services to Zurich, Basel and Interlaken.
Skiing from Lucerne: the Lucerne-Lake Lucerne region holds about 500 km of slopes across separate resorts — Engelberg, Melchsee-Frutt, Klewenalp-Stockhütte, Stoos, Hoch-Ybrig, Brunni and others. None of them is on the doorstep; all are day trips.
Engelberg and the Titlis: the Lucerne-Engelberg Express takes about an hour. The descent from the Titlis to Engelberg runs 12 km with 2,000 m of vertical, the longest in the region.
What else there is: an 8 km toboggan run at Melchsee-Frutt, a 9 km cross-country trail along the Engelberg valley, lake steamers, and Mount Pilatus and the Rigi above the city.
Where you stay: hotels here are city hotels, which is the point — you get a town that works in the evening and a different mountain each morning, at the cost of a train ride to the snow.
