Zurich Airport to Davos

You sink into the back seat in the arrivals hall, and within a few minutes Zurich Airport is behind you and the road is running southeast, out of the lowlands and toward the wall of Graubünden peaks that close off the horizon above Davos. No platform, no change, no luggage to wrestle - just the windscreen filling with lake, then valley, then mountains as the car climbs.

Most carriers take the A3 first, tracing the south shore of the Walensee where the Churfirsten cliffs drop almost straight into the water, then pick up the A13 south to Landquart. That is where the motorway ends and the mountains begin. From Landquart the road climbs the Prattigau valley through Klosters and over the Wolfgang pass before dropping down into Davos Dorf and Davos Platz. It is roughly 150km and about 2 hours when the road is clear, and the second half is the part you remember - a steady alpine climb past timber chalets and snow-loaded firs.

Davos is the highest town in the Alps, sitting at around 1,560m, and it works year-round rather than as a single-season resort. In winter it is the Davos Klosters ski area - the vast Parsenn and Jakobshorn terrain shared with Klosters next door - plus the Spengler Cup ice hockey tournament in late December and the World Economic Forum every January. In summer it is high-altitude hiking and biking in genuinely thin, clean mountain air. Describing the run from the same airport up to another high alpine resort, our Zurich to St. Anton travel guide walks through the same trade-offs of transfer versus train for a ski week.

One practical note that shapes this route: it is entirely within Switzerland, so there is no border and no passport check. Swiss motorways use an annual vignette (CHF 40 a year) rather than per-trip toll booths, and most carriers already include it - there is nothing to buy or stick on a windscreen. The real variable is the mountain road in winter, where snow chains or winter tyres are required and carriers run winter-equipped vehicles as standard.