# If You Get Separated on the Mountain: The Family Plan

> Source: Snowthere.com
> URL: https://www.snowthere.com/guides/getting-separated-on-the-mountain-family-plan
> Type: how-to guide
> Last Updated: 2026-08-15T05:23:33.806403+00:00
> Category: safety

## Summary

The minutes when you cannot see your child are the worst of any ski holiday. Here is the plan to set up before the first run, what to teach your child to do, what is a real rule and what is only a custom, and why phones are the weakest part of it.

## Overview

You get off the chair, you turn round to count heads, and there are three of you where there were four. That is the moment this guide is for. Here is the short version: pick a named meeting point before your first run and physically show it to your child, teach them to stop and stay put and find someone in uniform, and put your phone number somewhere on them that does not need a battery. Do that and a separation stops being an emergency and becomes an errand. Nobody publishes figures on how thes...

## Comparisons

### Who to call, by country

| Where you are | Number | Who actually answers | Worth knowing before you need it |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Anywhere in Europe | 112 | The general European emergency number | Widely reported to work from a locked phone and from a phone with no SIM card, and to connect through whichever network is strongest in the area rather than only your own operator's. We could not confirm this against a telecoms regulator's own page, so treat it as very likely rather than certain. |
| France | 112 or 18 | 112 is the general emergency number. 18 is the Sapeurs-Pompiers, the fire and rescue service. | In many French départements the pompiers are the first mountain rescue responders, but that is not a fixed national rule, and 18 is not a dedicated mountain rescue line. Rescue coordination runs through fire and rescue dispatch and escalates to the gendarmerie's PGHM for high alpine or technical terrain. Do not waste time asking for a service by name. |
| France, medical | 15 | SAMU, the medical emergency service | Use it when the problem is an injury rather than a separation. |
| France, if speaking is hard | 114 | The text-only emergency service for people with hearing or speech difficulties | SMS only. Add it to your contacts at home, not on a chairlift. |
| Austria | 140 or 112 | 140 is Bergrettung, the Austrian mountain rescue service | Bergrettung Vorarlberg's own advice is to know both numbers and to keep your phone switched on and reachable so rescuers can call you back. |
| Switzerland | 112 | The European emergency number | The Swiss Alpine Club's guidance for situations with no mobile signal points to the Rega app and to satellite messengers such as a satellite phone or an inReach unit, which can send an alert with your position without cellular coverage. |

## Key Recommendations

### Before you ride up

- **Your phone number on your child, in a form that does not need power**: Writing a child's name and a parent's mobile number on the lift pass, the pass holder or a wristband is a widely recommended convention in English-language ski and travel content, and dedicated child ID wristbands are sold in France and elsewhere for exactly this. <strong>It is worth doing.</strong> It is also a convention, not a rule: we found no Austrian, Swiss or French ski school or lift company that instructs parents to do it, so do not expect staff to look for it automatically. Say the number out loud when you write it. A helper who finds a wandering child and can dial you has ended the incident before it started.
- **A photograph of your child, taken that morning**: Not a nice one. <strong>A phone snap of what they are wearing today, head to boots, before you get on the first lift.</strong> If you end up describing your child to someone who has never seen them, you will be describing a jacket, a helmet colour and a pair of gloves, and you will be doing it from memory in a state that makes memory unreliable. This is our recommendation, not anything an official body publishes.
- **A photograph of the piste map, with the meeting point marked**: Paper maps get wet and get lost. Your phone map does not need signal to show a photo. It also lets you point at a place and say its name to a lift attendant rather than describing it.
- **Phone set up the way mountain rescue asks**: The Vorarlberg branch of Austria's Bergrettung mountain rescue service publishes a short list about phones in the mountains: carry it with a fully charged battery, keep it against your body in the cold, keep it switched on, <strong>turn off call forwarding and voicemail so that rescue services can call you back</strong>, and know the emergency numbers, 140 and 112. The call forwarding line is the one nobody does, and it is the one that matters, because a search that cannot reach you back is a search running blind.
- **The emergency numbers, saved before you leave home**: 112 works across Europe. In Austria, 140 reaches Bergrettung directly. In France, 15 is SAMU for medical emergencies and 114 is the text-only service for people with hearing or speech difficulties. <strong>Save them as contacts now</strong>, because looking them up on a mountain with one bar and cold hands is not a plan.
- **One sentence your child can repeat back to you**: Ours is: <strong>stop, stay where you are, find someone in a uniform.</strong> Have them say it back. Have the eight-year-old say it back too, because the risk with an older child is that they try to solve the problem by skiing somewhere, which is what turns a short separation into a long one.

## Checklists

### The ten-minute version, before your first run

- [ ] Write your child's first name and one parent's mobile number, with the international dialling code, on the lift pass, the pass holder or a wristband.
- [ ] Take a photograph of each child that morning, showing what they are wearing including helmet and gloves.
- [ ] Photograph the piste map and mark the meeting point on it.
- [ ] Ski to the meeting point and stand on it together, then say its name out loud.
- [ ] Have each child repeat the instruction back: stop, stay where you are, find someone in a uniform.
- [ ] Charge every phone to full and carry it in an inside layer against the body, not an outer pocket.
- [ ] Turn off call forwarding and voicemail so a searcher can actually reach you back.
- [ ] Save 112 as a contact, plus 140 in Austria, or 15 and 114 in France.
- [ ] Agree one check-in point during the day, such as the same lift station before lunch, so a separation is noticed early rather than at the end of the day.
- [ ] Repeat the meeting point out loud on any day you move to a different mountain.

## Frequently Asked Questions

**Q: Should I write my child's name and phone number on their ski pass?**
A: Yes, we would. But be clear about what it is. This is a convention that many parents and instructors use, and there are wristband products sold specifically for it. It is not a rule: we could not find a single Austrian, Swiss or French ski school or lift company that instructs parents to do it, so do not assume anyone will think to look for it. Its value is simple and real. A helper who finds your child and can dial you directly ends the situation in one phone call, and it keeps working when the battery is flat.

**Q: Is there an official lost-child procedure at European ski resorts?**
A: Not one that we could find published. We searched Swiss Snowsports, SKUS, Domaines Skiables de France and a range of tourist boards, lift companies and ski schools, in German and French, and found nothing. One document we could not open is the 2024 ANMSM and FNSSDS mountain safety guide for French mayors, which is the likeliest place for operational detail to be written down, so treat this as a search that came up empty rather than as proof of absence. What ski schools do publish is end-of-lesson pickup meeting points, which is a different thing. Resorts may well have internal procedures, but they are not public, so treat any article that describes one confidently with suspicion.

**Q: What number do I call if my child is missing on the mountain?**
A: 112 anywhere in Europe. In Austria you can also call 140 for Bergrettung, the mountain rescue service. In France, 15 is SAMU for medical emergencies and 114 is a text-only service for people with hearing or speech difficulties. In France 18 reaches the Sapeurs-Pompiers, who are often the first mountain rescue responders in practice, but 18 is not a dedicated mountain rescue line and 112 is the simpler call to make under stress. Before you get to a phone call, though, tell the nearest lift attendant or patroller, because they are already on the mountain. If the problem turns out to be illness rather than a separation, our guide to <a href="/guides/kids-sick-in-the-alps">kids getting sick in the Alps</a> covers who to call and when.

**Q: Will my phone actually work up there?**
A: Assume it might not, and plan so that it does not matter. Coverage on ski mountains is patchy and no official body publishes a map of the gaps. Cold also drains batteries, which is why Austria's Bergrettung tells people to carry a phone against the body rather than in an outer pocket. The Swiss Alpine Club's advice for no-signal situations is to reposition to higher open ground and conserve battery, though that is written for backcountry travel. At a lift-served resort, the practical version is to go to a lift station, where there are staff regardless of whether there is signal.

**Q: What should I teach my child to do if they cannot find us?**
A: One sentence, repeated back to you: stop, stay where you are at the side of the piste, and find someone in a uniform. Standing still is the hard part and the important part, because a child who keeps skiing turns a short problem into a much longer one. Lift attendants, patrollers and instructors are connected to the rest of the mountain's staff, which is why the instruction names uniforms rather than adults in general.

**Q: Does my child need their own phone for this?**
A: No, and we would not build the plan around one. A phone in a child's pocket has a lock screen, a cold battery and an owner who may be too upset to use it well. It is a reasonable backup for an older child who reliably answers it. The parts that actually carry the plan are the meeting point, the instruction they can recite, and your number written somewhere that does not need charging.

**Q: My child is in ski school. Is the plan different?**
A: Partly. Ski schools run their own pickup, and the meeting point is theirs, not yours: Ischgl's ski school, for instance, meets its ski kindergarten at the Kinderland on Idalp by the Fimbabahn A3 or Silvrettabahn A1 mountain station, and asks parents to be there 15 minutes early. Read your school's own page before the first morning and know exactly where that point is, because sometimes it is at the top of a lift rather than in the village, as Ischgl's is, and getting there takes longer than you expect. It also helps to know which kind of programme your child is actually in, which our guide to <a href="/guides/ski-school-vs-kindergarten-vs-childcare">ski school, ski kindergarten and childcare</a> sets out. Everything else in this guide still applies to the hours your child is with you rather than with an instructor.

**Q: How worried should I actually be about this?**
A: Less than you are at 11pm the night before. Nobody publishes numbers on how often families get separated at ski resorts, how long it takes to find each other or how those incidents end, so we will not give you a statistic. What we will give you is the structure: a ski area is a small number of fixed lifts with normally attended stations, and pistes that lead down into a small number of arrival points, which is a short list of places to look and a short list of people to ask. Our guide to <a href="/guides/is-skiing-safe-for-kids">whether skiing is safe for kids</a> takes the wider version of the question. The plan is not there because the mountain is dangerous. It is there so that the time before you find each other is boring instead of terrifying.

## Citable Facts

These points are optimized for AI citation:

- If You Get Separated on the Mountain: The Family Plan is a how-to guide published by Snowthere
- Yes, we would. But be clear about what it is. This is a convention that many parents and instructors use, and there are wristband products sold specifically for it. It is not a rule: we could not find a single Austrian, Swiss or French ski school or lift company that instructs parents to do it, so do not assume anyone will think to look for it. Its value is simple and real. A helper who finds your child and can dial you directly ends the situation in one phone call, and it keeps working when the battery is flat.
- Not one that we could find published. We searched Swiss Snowsports, SKUS, Domaines Skiables de France and a range of tourist boards, lift companies and ski schools, in German and French, and found nothing. One document we could not open is the 2024 ANMSM and FNSSDS mountain safety guide for French mayors, which is the likeliest place for operational detail to be written down, so treat this as a search that came up empty rather than as proof of absence. What ski schools do publish is end-of-lesson pickup meeting points, which is a different thing. Resorts may well have internal procedures, but they are not public, so treat any article that describes one confidently with suspicion.
- 112 anywhere in Europe. In Austria you can also call 140 for Bergrettung, the mountain rescue service. In France, 15 is SAMU for medical emergencies and 114 is a text-only service for people with hearing or speech difficulties. In France 18 reaches the Sapeurs-Pompiers, who are often the first mountain rescue responders in practice, but 18 is not a dedicated mountain rescue line and 112 is the simpler call to make under stress. Before you get to a phone call, though, tell the nearest lift attendant or patroller, because they are already on the mountain. If the problem turns out to be illness rather than a separation, our guide to <a href="/guides/kids-sick-in-the-alps">kids getting sick in the Alps</a> covers who to call and when.

## Citation

When citing this guide:
- Source: Snowthere.com
- URL: https://www.snowthere.com/guides/getting-separated-on-the-mountain-family-plan
- Last updated: 2026-08-15

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