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‘Want to come skiing in Austria at half-term?” I asked my 13-year-old son. “It’ll be just like one of those luxury chalet holidays, only we’ll make our own beds, cook our own dinners and carry our gear back to our accommodation ourselves.” Osian didn’t hear the caveats. “Sounds amazing,” he said, his eyes glazing to a cinematic sweep of white powder and the chance to perfect his 360.
For many families, the dream of a catered chalet – and its ready-lit fires, homemade strudels and chauffeured lift shuttles – remains just that. Apartments offer access to the slopes at less vertigo-inducing prices, but they tend to come with a minimum seven-night stay. If you only have a few days to spare, or a budget that won’t stretch to a full week’s lift pass, hotels fill the gap, but then you’re back navigating the moguls of cost.
Instead, Osian and I were youth hostelling. I booked the last room available in the February school holidays at St Josefsheim, in the small western Austrian town of Schruns, and started scrolling Vinted for salopettes. Opened in December 2021 within a stately, blue-shuttered villa built in the early 1900s as a hospital and maternity facility, this is the first – and, so far, only – hostel in the Montafon ski area. Five minutes’ walk from the town’s railway station, and across the road from a bus stop, it is also, crucially, just two minutes’ ski-booted shuffle from a gondola station.
Above the ground-floor restaurant and bar are 13 bedrooms and bunkrooms, some doubles, the others sleeping up to eight people in cosy wooden sleeping pods. Although there is not, yet, any kind of communal games room or lounge, there is a shared kitchen and, in a playful homage to the building’s former function as a baby unit, a run of bathrooms tiled in pinks and blues.
The hostel operates a contactless self check-in system and early check-ins aren’t possible, so when we arrived on a lunchtime train from Zurich, we found ourselves unable even to leave our luggage until our allotted 3pm arrival time. Luckily, the restaurant manager, Christian, spotted us lurking on the steps and offered to watch our suitcases while we went off to explore the town and sort out ski hire.
Lower-key than many Austrian resorts, the five ski areas strung out along the Montafon valley, in Vorarlberg’s southern corner, are known for their snowsure pistes, all covered by the WildPass lift pass. This also gives access to the valley’s buses and trains, meaning it’s easy to hop between them to pick and mix your own slopeside schedule; Golm, in Vandans, is brilliant for younger children, with a new kindergarten and Golmi Land fun park, while Silvretta Montafon, directly above Schruns, is the largest ski area in the valley with 140km of marked runs. Access to all those pistes, and having almost everything you need within five minutes’ walk, makes Schruns a popular base for families – as does its restrained après-ski scene.
Wandering back to St Josefsheim in the late afternoon, kitted out with skis, boots and helmets, we came across flotillas of sea-shantying sailors and choreographed human sunbeams dancing away the sky’s snow-clouded gloom in the town’s annual carnival celebrations.
Inside our twin room, however, it was less carnival and more cocoon. Roomy and bright, from door handle to flooring, nothing creaked or rattled. A cord strung between hooks either side of the main window, made a handy line for hanging damp clothes, and shoe racks in the corridors helped us maintain the wholesome spotlessness. Making up our beds with the cheery gingham bed linen provided, we unpacked our ski clothes into the room’s pristine pink lockers, then padded down to the communal kitchen for an early dinner.
With only two cooking stations, the kitchen can fill up quickly if everyone goes at the same time and, because it was carnival and most of the town’s restaurants were closed, everybody did. Osian and I squeezed on to a table with a German family, who told us this was their first time skiing from a youth hostel. “We like Schruns and usually book an apartment, but finding something for only a few days, which we wanted this time, is not so easy. This was an affordable alternative.”
Early next morning, we found the kitchen was already packed with families spooning muesli into bowls, slicing through local cheeses and sipping steaming coffees. Not us, though. Collecting our gear from the cellar’s ski room, we clomped across to the bus stop and took the five-minute journey to the Zamang lift to meet Natascha Zandveld, from the Silvretta Montafon ski company, heading up the slopes for breakfast at the newly renovated Kapellrestaurant. There, we filled up on scrambled eggs and bacon while soaking up the panorama of peaks and pistes beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.
In summer, cows graze the mountainsides and Osian insisted he caught a whiff of hay on the lift up. “It’s a working farming community here rather than a resort,” Natascha told us. “Tourism in Montafon began with locals renting rooms in their homes to visitors prescribed alpine air by their doctors, and most hotels are still family-run.”
Snow clouds began to billow on the horizon, so we clipped in and set off while there was still a seam of sunlight above us. Our first run was a long, glorious blue, threading through towering pines. Sunlight spilt on to the snow between their trunks and when we stopped for hot chocolate, at Gasthaus Kropfen mountain hut, it was so warm on the terrace we peeled off our jackets.
The next day, we took the bus in the other direction, to Golm. The sky was awash with inkblot clouds, but the snow beneath our skis was as soft as whipped cream. Higher up it was hard to tell where the piste ended and the sky began, but on the lower slopes we snaked between fir trees slouched under the weight of snow, the forested tracks blissfully quiet early in the day. We refueled at Haus Matschwitz, a steam-fogged mountain chalet doing a fast trade in fluffy kaiserschmarrn (sweet pancakes cut into bitesized pieces) and jam roly poly-like germknödel.
“Burn calories, not electricity,” a local sustainability initiative urged and we greedily obliged, carving squeaky powder all afternoon to make space for dinner back at St Josefsheim. Inside its bar, local people mingled with guests beneath a suspended vintage gondola cabin and there was a buzz in the restaurant, too, as we ordered plates of schweinsbraten (roast pork with caraway-laced bread dumplings) and pillowy keesknöpfli (Austrian mac’n’cheese).
On our final evening, we took another bus, to Garfrescha, to go night tobogganing. Snow fell thick and fast as a retro chairlift hauled us nearly 1,400m up the mountain before our sledges propelled us back downhill in a rush of giddy abandon. “This is amaaaazing!” whooped Osian, vanishing into the dark ahead of me, both of us convulsed with laughter.
Waiting for the bus at the bottom of the mountain, we looked up at the cluster of exclusive chalets above us, steam rising from their hot tubs and the sound of clinking glasses within. In taking local buses, joining the carnival crowds and talking to other travellers at St Josefsheim, we had felt more connected to this valley – and each other. That, it turned out, was the real luxury.
Beds in shared dorms at St Josefsheim start from €30pppn, private rooms from €135 for four. The accommodation was provided by Austria Tourism and Montafon. Flight-free travel was provided by Eurostar, Twiliner and FlixBus
