Travel from your couch with a drone

You can now travel around Switzerland – and neighbouring France and Italy – via a recently established site, TravelByDrone.com, that allows you to visit a town, prepare a hike, or plan a boat trip or skiing holiday, by first viewing the area from the air. The site currently comprises over 3,500 quality drone videos by contributors the world over. For example, you can visit Venice or pursue the wildebeest migration in Tanzania’s Serengeti national park. There are even some from Ukraine, prior to any war devastation.

For Switzerland, TravelByDrone now offers 62 videos. Some are short, others breathtakingly longer. You simply go to the map of Switzerland and then zone in on one of the red marked position flags. Considered far better than Google Street Views, the site offers Swiss views that include 12 from Geneva, 10 from Lausanne, and two from the Vevey-Montreux vicinity.

You can glide over the Rhone river and the Dardagny vineyards below Geneva, tour the footpaths and sports fields of the EPFL in Lausanne, or zoom in and out of the valleys and mountains around Sion. You can also soar over Basel, Zurich or tour the Heidi meadows near Lichtenstein. Or do VTT cross-country biking, ski and paragliding runs. Or you can view the impact of climate change on fast-receding glaciers. This is a whole new way of visiting Switzerland. Given the relative low cost of purchasing a drone – CHF 400-500 for a relatively good one – one can expect regular updates as more people get into this extraordinary new form of aerial viewing.