Austria as a ski destination
Austria is the densest skiing country in the Alps and, by first entries, second in the world only to the United States. Its industry counts 250 cableway companies alongside roughly 400 drag-lift operators, running 1,111 cableway installations over about 23,700 hectares of prepared piste — an unusual concentration of lift infrastructure in a country the size of Maine.12
- Cableway installations
- 1,111
- Cableway companies
- 250
- Prepared piste
- 23,700 ha
- First entries, 2024/25
- 51.9 million
What it is known for
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Lift density over sheer altitude
Austrian resorts sit lower than the French or Swiss high-altitude stations — the highest lift-served point in the app's Austrian corpus is 3,424 m — and compensate with tightly linked lift networks and heavy snowmaking investment.1
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Village skiing rather than purpose-built
Most Austrian areas grew out of existing farming villages rather than being built from nothing at altitude, which is why the lift base is usually in the middle of a working town.1
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A season measured in the tens of millions
Austrian cableways recorded 51.9 million first entries in 2024/25 and around 54 million in 2025/26, one of the strongest winters on record.12
Resort guides
158 of the 1,311 ski areas mapped in the SkiAllDay app are in Austria, together 5,738 km of downhill terrain and 2,329 lifts. A cross-border area counts in every country it touches. The guides below are the ones written up so far.
| Resort | Pistes | Vertical | Lifts | Piste / lift km | Lift min / ski hr | North-facing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ski Arlberg Tyrol and Vorarlberg | 299.7 km | 1,507 m | 85 | 1.27 | 33 | 39% |
Piste, vertical and lift counts are the operators' own figures. The last three columns are measured from each resort's lift and piste network — see any resort page for how. Piste per lift km describes how sparse a lift network is, not how good it is: sort on it to find long runs off few lifts, or on lift minutes per ski hour to find quick laps.