I recently had the pleasure of skiing with Alan in the three valleys France or le trois vallés.
Three main resorts make up the area Courchevel 1850, Val Thorens and Meribel.



There are other places to stay but the key is just to be close inside the area consisting of these 3 valleys as it has an extensive network of lifts and a good variety of runs. You can do all three in a day easily. The lift pass for a week is more for all the valleys but is worth it, if you were a beginner you might not get the value from it however I would still recommend you get it if money isnt tight. It also looks ideal if you are wanting to learn to ski having some really forgiving easy runs.
We stayed in chalet Ecrasé in the largest of the resorts Courcheval 1850 which sits west of the central Merribal valley and then east of Meribel is val Torens and les Menuires.

I was surprised that our Chalet booked through http://www.igluski.com/ and run by http://www.supertravel.co.uk/SkiDefault.asp was empty apart from us. This was good in that we had more space but not so good because we would have less opportunity to socialise with other skiers, something I usually like. Although according to Roeena at Igluski, just before booking it was full. I'm sure this was so we would book quickly; not great Igluski!
We tried to also book ski hire through http://www.worldski.com/, but they didn't answer emails expediently and efficiently enough before we left and Alan didn't have any luck on the telephone either. We wanted to be exact about where we would pick up the skis. Unfortunately they got back to us too late and we were already there. When they did get back to us they didn't give us any really useful information, just mentioned that it would have been in the email at booking time. Not ideal, I love to get emails telling me what I at least asked for and more besides. Have you tried this method of ski hire? as it would have saved us about 50 quid, whereas out there it cost us £ 137 for boots and skis as the top package.