Going high in Kuhtai – the magic ingredients for a ski break

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 Content production 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