Austria’s ski resorts are the most popular with tourists from Europe

Austria’s mountains have been attracting crowds of winter sports tourists for years. One in nine Europeans takes a winter holiday, and 51% of them book their accommodation in Austria, meaning that the Alpine republic welcomes as many tourists as all the other ski resorts in Europe combined. This impressive finding comes from a recent study on Europeans’ travel habits in winter. The main reasons for this success are that Austria, as a traditional winter sports destination, has a very reliable snow cover and also sets very high standards in service.

However, Austria does not intend to rest on its laurels, as Stefan Falk, head of the German office of the Austrian National Tourist Office, assures us. In fact, Austrian hotels and cable car operators will invest around 1 billion euros in the 2008/09 winter season alone to further improve the country’s tourism quality, Falk says, citing the Austrian Hotel and Tourism Bank (ÖTH).

Not only do tourists flock to Austria’s winter sports hotels in great numbers, but they are also demonstrably very happy there. At regular intervals, Tourismusmonitoring Austria (T-MONA) measures how satisfied tourists are with Austria’s hotels, restaurants and general infrastructure. On a scale of 1 (very good) to 6 (very disappointing), tourism businesses in Austria achieve an average score of 1.6.