White Pine Lodge @ Schweitzer — Hotel in Sandpoint

My dad and I recently came to Schweitzer for a 5 day ski trip. We stayed in White Pine unit 502.

I’ll start by saying we were very impressed with Schweitzer as a ski mountain. We usually ski together in Utah, but wanted to change it up this year. We weren’t expecting Schweitzer to be as big as something like Park City, but we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of skiable terrain. The mountain has a lot to offer all levels of skiers! And their claim that you won’t wait in long lift lines is absolutely true. It’s definitely still a “best kept secret” mountain.

Unfortunately, we were very disappointed in the accommodations. We paid what I would consider a pretty hefty sum for the opportunity to stay right in the village and I do not think we got our money’s worth. I would not recommend staying in White Pine.

First and foremost, we had wifi issues the entire trip. They claim they have high speed internet, but at one point I did an internet speed test and we were getting 3 MBps. This isn’t enough to watch Netflix or even load basic websites. Normally, when we ski for a week, I work for a day or two; luckily I didn’t plan to work this trip because the wifi could not have supported video calling. To make the wifi issue even more annoying, it became abundantly clear when we reported the issue, that Schweitzer’s staff is not prepared to manage the property appropriately.

From my understanding the White Pine lodge is a bit unique in that all of the units are privately owned, but if the owner wants to rent their unit, it’s managed through Schweitzer. This model would be fine if Schweitzer’s staff was trained and prepared to support the units, but that was not the case. To be clear, the staff was wonderful and did everything they could to try to troubleshoot. Kelly in particular was extremely helpful, so I don’t fault the staff at all. I do fault Schweitzer’s management, because it was clear that the staff isn’t trained to troubleshoot issues in the owned units. We had two people come to our room to try to troubleshoot and once they saw the owners had a different box than what they were familiar with, they couldn’t help. If Schweitzer is selling the properties on their website they need to be prepared to manage and support them when a guest has an issue.

In addition to the wifi issues, I was very disappointed in the quality of the hideaway bed in the living room. It was clearly very old and the mattress pad was pretty gross. The blinds on the balcony door in our unit were also completely broken and unable to be lowered, so the person sleeping in the living room couldn’t close the blinds for privacy or light reduction. It’s also worth noting that I called Schweitzer the week before our arrival to see if our unit or building had a washer/dryer. The woman at the desk told me no, White Pine does not have laundry, but we could access coin machines in the building across from us. Based on this, it was quite surprising to find that there was a shared building washer/dryer literally right outside of our door in White Pine.

In my mind all of these issues point back to the model Schweitzer has adopted where they “manage” the owned units as rentals. If we had booked through Airbnb I could have seen other people’s reviews on our specific unit and may not have booked. I also would have had direct access to the owner to try to troubleshoot wifi/technology issues or ask questions about things like the washer/dryer. I think the “managed” model can work, but if Schweitzer is going to manage these units they need to train their staff to troubleshoot or answer questions correctly. They also need to set a standard for quality so renters don’t deal with low quality beds or broken blinds.

Overall not worth the money. I’ll definitely come back to Schweitzer to ski, but I will also definitely opt to stay in an Airbnb...

Having a separate king size bedroom is really nice. The room has a great view and the live Christmas tree my husband arranged to put in the living room was beautiful. The kitchen is fairly well stocked if you feel like cooking instead of going out. The only reasons the room didn’t receive 5 stars is there isn’t a mirror in the bedroom which makes it difficult for 3 people to get ready with only one mirror in the bathroom; the tvs randomly decide to turn off and the tv in the bedroom is about 2 decades old. My laptop has a bigger screen...

Honestly, this lodge provided exactly what you needed at the beginning and end of the day on the slopes. You are about 100 yards from the lifts so you can just go right from the front to the lifts, and then they have nice rooms and hot tubs for you to wind down at the end. It also isn't too expensive to stay here, so you should consider it for the convenience sake. Especially as the road going down from Schweitzer can be horrible if...