Spring may be here but March has seen some of the season’s best snow in the Alps. And once Easter is out the way, there is still time to grab a cheaper short break on the slopes.
For those who can manage that, or who are already eyeing up a white weekend next season, Simon Lambert says it can pay to go high for guaranteed snow, as he found on a recent trip to Austria’s Kuhtai for This is Money’s Holidays section.
Read his review of Kuhtai and its Mooshaus hotel, with a unique rooftop infinity pool below and see Simon’s five tips for saving money on a ski holiday.
Snowsure: Austria’s Kuhtai is 40 minutes drive from Innsbruck and its slopes rise up from 2,020m, meaning that decent snow cover is almost guaranteed
An hour after coming off the mountain in Kuhtai, we had dropped our snowboard bag in Innsbruck airport and were heading upstairs for a schnitzel.
It might seem unusual to start a travel review with details of checking in for the flight home, but if you head away for a weekend’s skiing or snowboarding a painless piste-to-plane experience is one of the magic ingredients.
On my checklist of these crucial elements are: maximum time on the slopes and minimum time travelling, the best possible chance of good snow, and the best possible place to stay, whether on a budget or splashing out.
And there’s still time to bag a weekend away this year, where you can get the most bang for your buck with a spring mountain break.
After a shaky early season, March has seen great snow across much of the Alps and once the Easter weekend is gone, April means less crowds and lower prices.
But the advice is to go high, with upper resorts retaining lots of all that snow but lower resorts suffering from rain and their base melting away earlier in the season.
If you can’t make the slopes at short notice but are tempted by all those social media photos and reels of fresh powder days, now’s not a bad time to get the ball rolling on a weekend away next January and lock into very early-bird low prices.
In terms of my mountain weekend magic ingredients – honed over decades of escaping to feed my snow habit – a trip earlier this season to Kuhtai, in Austria’s Tyrol, delivered.
Flying out on a Thursday and returning on Sunday, we got fresh powder, two out of three days of blue skies and good snow, and relaxed at the Mooshuas hotel, with its unique rooftop infinity pool (more on which later).
The unique selling point of the Mooshaus hotel, in Kuhtai, is its rooftop infinity pool round the perimeter of the building
Kuhtai sits 40 minutes’ drive from Innsbruck at a snowsure 2,020 metres, with 44km of slopes, served by 12 lifts rising up to a peak of 2,520m, either side of the mountain pass.
Self-contained Kuhtai isn’t one of Europe’s sprawling connected mega-resorts but that means you can easily get from one side to the other and enjoy all the slopes.
The great advantage of Kuhtai is that with the lifts starting at 2,000 metres you are pretty much guaranteed decent snow right from the moment you step onto your skis or board.
In recent years, that has definitely counted. Both this season and last have seen periods of great snow but also prolonged warm spells, rain in months that it shouldn’t arrive in, and long dry spells.
But if the advantage of a higher resort is less freeze-thaw and better snow, the disadvantage arrives in bad weather when it can turn into a total whiteout.
Snow had just blown in as we arrived at Mooshaus in time for a late lunch on Thursday afternoon, after flying from Gatwick to Innsbruck that morning.
It continued to dump it down all night and we woke up to about 20cm of fresh snow.
Our spacious, modern alpine-styled bedroom’s big sliding doors onto a terrace would usually afford a view of the mountains, but you could just about see the slope opposite and there were no peaks on show.
It was forecast to clear up at about lunchtime, but no one was going to be seeing much on Kuhtai’s pistes that morning. So, it was time for a Plan B – something that for me is an essential option when choosing a resort.
The piste map of neighbouring Hochoetz showed trees – and they are your friend when visibility is poor.
After enjoying Mooshaus’s seriously copious breakfast – think cereals, yoghurts, fruit, bacon, sausages, more different breads than you could list, and that Austrian ski hotel classic, a fresh chef-made omelette done to your specifications – speck ham and peppers, in my case – we headed out.
A 15-minute ride on regular buses from Kuhtai, Hochoetz sits a bit lower, with its highest lift climbing to 2,272, giving slopes that run down into the tree line.
The bus was simple and quick and even after that leisurely breakfast, we were still on the piste at the top of the cable car up from the Ochsengarten base station just after 10am.
Hochoetz’s tree-lined slopes provided better visibility for tracking out the fresh snow on a cloudy morning before the sky started to clear
The first day in a new ski area can always be a bit pot luck and that’s even more so when the skies are thick with snow and you can’t see much. We struck gold in Hochoetz, however, opting to head for what looked like a reasonably sheltered bowl, where some higher-lying pistes headed down into the trees.
Served by the fast six-man Wetterkreuzbahn chairlift, this part of the mountain provided a great morning of cruising empty pistes and tracking out the powder fields and chutes down into the trees at the bottom.
The sun started to poke its head out of the clouds just before lunch, leaving us with clear blue skies by the time we took the long run down back to the bus stop to catch a ride back for a few late afternoon runs in Kuhtai.
While Kuhtai’s pistes were empty, it was a seriously cold afternoon and heading back to the hotel for a drink, followed by the promise of a swim in that rooftop pool and then a sauna, proved too tempting for us to stay out until last lifts.
Mooshaus’s Skypool looks great in the photos and is even better in real life, says Simon Lambert
Owned by the Gerber family, which has a number of hotels and businesses in Kuhtai, the 100-room Mooshaus is a four star superior hotel that has had a recent makeover. Its eye-catching unique selling point is the Skypool. Described as the highest infinity pool in the Alps, it is an almost 100-metre-long rooftop pool that goes round the perimeter of the main building.
It looks amazing in the photos and in real life it’s better. Heated via a bioheat system, it is warm enough to relax in. Swimming as the snow falls or looking out over the jagged dusk beauty of the mountain tops on a clear night, feels really special.
Come to Mooshaus with kids though and they might feel a bit jealous, as the jewel-in-the-crown Skypool is only for over-16s. They do get a family-friendly big indoor swimming pool and sauna downstairs, where there is also an extensive sauna and wellness area for adults, with indoor and outdoor pools and relaxation areas.
Elsewhere in the hotel children get a great deal. And we couldn’t help but notice there were more families than you might expect staying at Mooshaus.
On a tour of the hotel the next morning we found out why. Mooshaus has extensive facilities for children of all ages: the Ravensburger playworld for the smallest, the Moosclub for younger children, and areas for older children to hang out, watch movies and play video games.
The hotel is apparently very popular with German families, particularly those making the short drive over from Munich and Bavaria. On the basis that happy children makes for happy parents, you can see they are clearly on to something.
My wife and I were enjoying a weekend without our two girls, however, so we had the chance to take full advantage of Mooshaus’s six course dinners, extensive wine list with some excellent Austrian reds, and make the most of full days on the slopes.
A powder day up high in Kuhtai: After March has seen lots of snow fall across the Alps, skiers and snowboarders have managed plenty of bluebird days like this
Friday had started snowy, but Saturday dawned bluebird. It was the kind of day perfect for Kuhtai and we made the most of the fresh corduroy pistes and patches of powder still left.
While Kuhtai has a selection of blue runs, they make up just 20 per cent of its pistes – comparable to the 17 per cent consisting of black runs. The area is instead dominated by red runs, which make up 57 per cent of the slopes. But while their steepness pitches them at the more challenging end of the intermediate level, they tend to also be nice, sweeping, wide motorway runs that when well-groomed offer the chance to lay down some fast and satisfying turns.
The Hohemutbahn chairlift serves slopes overlooking the reservoir and valley below
One of our favourite parts of the resort was the area by the Hohemutbahn chairlift, where there was a fun side-piste area of powder still to be explored and fantastic views to be had, over the tree-lined slopes above the reservoir and valley below.
Kuhtai isn’t the largest of areas, something worth bearing in mind if your idea of a good day’s skiing is zig-zagging a mega-resort. But bigger isn’t always better and there’s a lot of fun to be had skiing a resort where you can rack up the runs without constantly feeling you are trying to get from one place to another.
For a long weekend Kuhtai is perfect, as long as you are willing to find your favourite runs and do them a few times each. The shared ski pass with Hochhoetz also doubles the total area to 88km of pistes.
Kuhtai also has an ace up its sleeve in the form of the Innsbruck Ski Plus City Pass. This is a ski pass valid at 13 resorts surrounding the alpine city, which also includes ski buses to them, public transport, 22 attractions in the area, admission to three different swimming pools and more. You can find out more in a review of Innsbruck and the Ski Plus City Pass that I did last year.
Our final morning in Kuhtai brought blue skies again and the opportunity to redo some of our favourite runs from the day before.
After breakfast and checking out, there was time for a full morning on the mountain before riding back to the door of the hotel, doing a quick change, packing the snowboard bag, and jumping in a taxi to the airport.
We came off the mountain at lunchtime and were back home in England in time for dinner on Sunday evening. If only we could do that every weekend.
