Skiing trip to Austria over Christmas

Anyone out there interested in meeting up for a ski trip to Tirol in Austria over the xmas break. I am thinking of doing this PPtravel tour Ski Trip. If your interested or if perhaps you have a better idea post here and lets see what we can come up with.

keep cool

SG

We've already booked a trip to France at that time, so I'm out. But I would mention a few things to consider after having spent last Christmas/New Year in Austria.

1. Snow. Last winter was particularly bad and hopefully won't be repeated. But that's still fairly early in the season. St. Johann/Tirol and Kitzbuehl are pretty low altitude, so you may have a problem there. I'd be looking at places higher up, prefereably with a glacier nearby. We nearly booked Bad Gastein before settling on France, and there are plently of other options easily reachable from Salzburg, Innsbruck or Munich (flights) that will be more snowsure than Johann/Tirol and Kitzbuehl.

2. Book now (or better yet three months ago). In the German speaking world, people seem to book their holidays a year in advance (usually booking for the next year as they leave from this year's holiday). We had a very difficult time finding accommodations in Innsbruck/Mittenwald/Garmisch for the Christmas/New Year's period last year, and we booked in August.

3. DIY over packages. Europeans seem to be crazy about package holidays. I don't get it (we Americans just don't really use them). In my experience you can usually get a better price by arranging things yourself. 299 Pounds (€430) for a week’s accommodations only, you could easily beat. Not in St. Anton or Ischgl maybe, but elsewhere I'm sure you could put together a better holiday than that package for quite a bit less money.

You'd be best to wait til end of February til mid-April to book if you want to be sure of having any snow. Either it's been cold and dry so there's been only artificial snow, or warm like last year and none at all. Then it dumps like an SOB in March/April. That's been the pattern the last few years anyway.

I would also agree that it's somewhat risky to book for Christmas in this area - although it isn't far from here to the glacier at Kaprun. If you've got no car though, that's not really an option. Check out Zillertal. You can stay in the valley really cheap, and hire a car and drive to a different resort each day. You have Hintertux if the snow is really bad (it's open now, so will definitely be open then) but heaps of other choices like Zell am Ziller, Mayrhofen, Hochzillertal, Hochfugen - the list goes on. It's a great valley.