Ski Total - a brief history

Ski Total was set up in 1982 (the same year that Skiworld started) by two friends, Martin Jenner and Simon Strong. From the start their chalet holidays were aimed at the adult market and they looked for good value and interesting alpine resorts.

In the early years they featured properties in Les Gets and Les Contamines in France but later added St Anton and Stuben in the Arlberg area of Austria. They later expanded in France to Meribel, and then Val d'Isere when they purchased Chalet Premiere Neige (now with Skiworld). By the turn of the century they had built themselves to a medium sized chalet operator selling out 2002 to Peter Dyer who was by then head of the Enigma Travel Group.

Dyer had previously set up Crystal Holidays in 1980 selling out to the Dial Group from the USA in 1991 for £4m. He went on to steer Crystal through a period of aggressive and rapid expansion until it reached the size where it was sending over 130,000 people a year on holiday. In 1998 the Dial Group decided to cash-in on their investment and sold Crystal to Thomson Holidays for £66m. Peter went to Thomson Holidays but there was a clash of business cultures which resulted in his departure a year later. With a two year exclusion clause written into his exit agreement from Thomson it was not until 2001 that the ski holiday industry saw the return of Pete Dyer.

His first acquisition and return to the market was when his newly formed Enigma Travel Group bought the family ski specialist, Ski Esprit. A year later Dyer bought Ski Total and in 2004 he established Santa's Lapland.

In 2010 the Swiss company, Hotelplan, who already owned the respected hotel based ski holiday brand, Inghams, bought the Enigma Group (Ski Total, Esprit and Santas Lapland) for an undisclosed sum. By 2017 Ski Total had 95 catered chalet properties in the Alps which accounted for over 1,640 guests each week. Ski Esprit had a further 47 chalets and Inghams a further 62 chalets plus a wide selection of hotels and chalet hotels.