 Poster: A snowHead
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Resort: Kaprun
Country: Austria
Domain: Pinzgau
Author: Northernsoulboy
Date: 07/02/10 – 14/02/10
Our holiday: Two couples, each with two children, three of whom are aged nine and one of whom is aged six. Ours are good skiers, the other couple's had never skied before.
We booked through Esprit (very good - http://www.espritski.com/), flew Monarch (pretty average) and stayed at the half-board Chalet Sonnenalp.
It was our second year running with the kids at Kaprun in the Sonnenalp - Esprit do have a second chalet in the village (Chalet Mara) but I'd recommend Sonnenalp as you have to collect your children from there after their lessons and lunch. Some people from Mara found this a drag.
We flew to Salzburg from Gatwick; flight times are good, the flight is around 90 minutes and the transfer is a further 90 minutes.
Kaprun is a pretty village with a few good restaurants and bars and is good for three ski areas: its own Maiskogel mountain and the Kitzsteinhorn Glacier and Zell am See, both around 10 minutes away by free bus.
Booked through: Snowfinders (http://www.snowfinders.co.uk/)
In-resort transport: Esprit run a free 9am bus in the morning which calls at both chalets and then first at the nursery slops area (separate from other skiing), then at the Maiskogel, and finally at the Glacier.
The half-hourly K2 bus stops 30m from Sonnenalp (can't comment on Mara) and this calls at the Maiskogel and then the Glacier.
There is a further 'town' bus - the Dorfbus - which runs every 15 minutes; this stops 20m from the chalet and goes to the Maiskogel only.
To get to Zell, you catch any of these, get off at the Maiskogel and catch the 660 bus which runs every half hour.
Speaking a someone who hates buses and prefers ski-in and ski-out, these are not bad at all.
Ski-ing for intermediates and above
The Maiskogel is a small mountain with one or two reds, a short black and a couple of blues. It loses the sun in the lateish afternoon, and gets a bit icy and windblown. Not my favourite place to ski, though there is an excellent restaurant right at the top (the Glocknerblick) which is very warm and cosy and serves good food.
The Glacier is better and obviously always has snow. There are a couple of gondolas up from the bottom (the nearby funicular was the scene of the Kaprun disaster, in which 150+ skiers died in a tunnel fire ten years ago) to a sort of base level, and a further gondola up to the main sk area. Both are quick - never had to queue. You only get one trip up per day on your lift pass, though.
Good chairs once up top. It's not a huge area - maybe four times the size of the Maiskogel - but on a sunny day the views are gorgeous and the ski-ing is great. There's nothing too taxing - Red 11 gets you back to the top of the gondola and has a nice schuss followed by a steep rise, which puts off some people, so they gondola back down.
We ate mostly at the self-service Alpin Centre - last year we waited for 30 minutes to get noticed at the outdoor Gletschermuhle, so gave that a miss this year.
Zell is bigger again, and is, again, lovely on a sunny day. There are some awesome views and some lovely runs through the trees - we did all the blacks bar one (because of time) and found them all easily skiable. Black 11 is probably the toughest, and Black 15 the easiest, with some very flat linking stretches. Red 10, which gets you back down from the top to the bus stop at Schuttdorf is probably the toughest run in my mind - it's steep in parts, icy and it's pretty long, and at the end of a long day presents quite a challenge. Probably a black in my opinion - perhaps they don't like to say the only way down is a black or the gondola, because of the queues that would lead to.
Ski-ing for kids and beginners: The best kept secret for kids and beginners is probably Blue 1 at Zell. You get the Areitbahn 1 and 2 gondolas up from Schuttdorf and Blue 1 snakes all the way back down. In parts it is extremely flat but if you really are a beginner you can get out at the halfway point on Areitbahn 2 to cut out the slightly steeper stuff.
We skied this on the Friday of our holiday with our friends' two girls aged six and nine, neither of whom has skied before. They loved it.
The main blue at the Maiskogel is easy enough, but slightly steep and bottlenecky at the bottom.
There are some very flat blues at the Glacier too - principally 4a and 4b - but you have to t-bar to get to them. Be aware of competent skiers using these slopes as racetracks; last year my young daughter was almost hit by a young woman travelling at around 40mph who skied over the front of her skies as she was stationary. I still have nightmares about this. That said, most people were sensible.
Overall the terrain at all three places is fine for weak intermediates, as long as you avoid the blacks and the harder reds, and don't mind gondola-ing down in the afternoons.
I wouldn't chose it as a place to go myself, but for youngsters and early skiers it is excellent.
There's not much off-piste as far as I know, but then I wasn't really looking.
Prices We paid around £1.500 to Esprit for breakfast, afternoon cake and evening meal, flights, transfers, children's lessons and childcare and lunch until 2pm (every day except Friday, which is chalet day off).
Lift passes and ski hire for the kids and one adult (skis only) was a further 850 euro-ish.
A private lesson for my wife and her friend was 140 euro.
We didn't get away from many mountaintop restaurants without spending 20-30 euro a head, and the food was solid but not spectacular. That said, we were there to ski, not compare menus.
Accommodation: Fine - the Sonnenalp could do with a better communal bar area, but otherwise is pretty hard to fault at these prices. Esprit feed the kids first at 5.30pm, and you have aperitifs and nibbles at 7.30pm with dinner at 8pm. This is actually too late to eat, for me, but I think that was my only complaint. (I tell a lie - the showers are murderously hot and easy to knock from warm to scalding - careful with your children in them!) The food this year was absolutely outstanding (having been ordinary last year; this is obviously a luck of the draw kind of thing).
Childcare: The only reason to go with Esprit to Kaprun is with kids - they are a family operator, after all. That said, I've now used them twice and they've been excellent. The kids get taken to the Esprit bus at 8.45am, and you can either join them on that bus when it leaves at 9am or catch a later municipal one. Ours had a two hour lesson from 9.30am to 11.30am, were then taken back to the chalet for lunch and we collected them at 2pm. A couple of times we collected them at the bottom of the Maiskogel ourselves at 11.30am to take them ski-ing, but the option is there. (Esprit also do all day childcare and nursery for non-ski-ing tots as well I think.) In the evening, if you want it, you can sign up for a thing called Cocoa Club which runs from (I think) 7.30pm to 10pm. We signed up only because the kids were begging to be in it; lots of activities (including one where they were given a raw egg and some assorted materials, told to design a way of dropping it from 6ft and not breaking it, with the reward of egging the young lad in charge of them. He got egged about four times.)
The young people in charge of the kids and the chalet generally were a credit to themselves, their parents and their employers: helpful, energetic, cheerful and hard working at all times.
Conclusion: We're going somewhere next year with Esprit again, but not to Kaprun - three years running would be weird. We always said we wouldn't do 'kids club' type holidays, but the kids enjoy them and you can do as little or as much of that as you like. Highly recommended, though.
Last edited by Poster: A snowHead on Tue 16-02-10 17:16; edited 1 time in total
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