St Anton - January 2016

Ski with a mature group of a dozen, ages 42-58 all competent skiers, some very very competent. Just as importantly we do like our apres, and occasionally some of us should act our ages and not our UK shoe sizes.
For the last 10 years or so we have skied various resorts in Austria which we love, including Schladming, Soll, Saalbach and Kitzbuhel. This year, because of recommendations for the skiing and apres we have decided to give St Anton a try. We have usually stayed at 4* star hotels but due to trying to keep the price realistic and some of us were not even hardly using the hotel facilities to give an Austrian Chalet a try, hence we are staying at the Alpenheim on the 23/01/2016 for a week.
I have done an Austrian chalet before in Mayrhofen and loved it. Always found you get what you put into a ski holiday and by trying to help the chalet staff help you have a good time you are half way there. I appreciate they are normally staffed by youngsters but by the end of January they should be into the swing of it and 'cooking' on gas'.

I have a few questions you may be able to help us with.
Ski Equipment – We normally arrange our own ski hire for those who need it. Is there anywhere relatively conveniently placed and priced that you would recommend or suggest we avoid.

Skiing – There are not to many black runs we won't try but some ski them properly and others just survive them. Some of us (moi) have have fallen foul of a few bad ones which we still ache from years later if you get my drift. Steep steep and very narrow is not a high priority. Although a lot of us have skied for a while and mostly in Austria our opportunities to ski on unpisted safe runs in powder has been limited so any advise on this will be greatly received.

Apres- We know St Anton has a great reputation for apres, we always try and find a lively place with decent live music but appreciate that it is a younger resort. We can party with the best of them but don't want to be in a youth club. Any suggested watering holes.

Thanks for taking the time to read and thanks in advance should you reply.

Not long now, Austria like everywhere else could with a lot of the white stuff to fall. This forum gets quieter each season to the point it's hardly worth viewing . There are others about which are very useful indeed. PM me if you need to be pointed in the right direction.

It is a quieter forum but my questions normally get answered .The problem with the other forums i use ,your question gets swallowed up within a few hours and ends up on page 3 or 4in no time .
RE: St Anton
We also in the 42-50 brackets .We would have 1 or 2 the krazy kanguruh then head back and try and be out just before 7pm. We went to Scottys bar most nights .5-7pm €22 Any 2 meals with a beer or soft drink, pizza and pasta dishes.They are probably one of the best pizzas i've ever tasted .We did venture to Bobo's a couple of nights on the way home

Wesley, you make some very valid points about your subject in on other forums disappearing in the 'traffic'.
Scotty's Bar has been mentioned before as potential venue, we will look into that.
We are in a Chalet for a change as we normally do hotels, so our evening meal is taken care of. So always nice to have a decent bar etc for the proper après and then for those that have the stamina or energy somewhere for the second sitting after dinner.
Anywhere you would recommend or avoid for ski hire, I am aware they have had a shake up in town recently with their equivalent of a monopoly commission for collective fixing of the hire prices. So in theory it should be at least a bit more competitively priced. Come the end of the day we do not mind paying money to hire decent equipment but St Anton had a bad reputation for ripping the punters off with their collectively fixed rates.

Scarlet Fez wrote:So in theory it should be at least a bit more competitively priced.

I'd be interested to hear what you find on the ground/in the town; whether there is actually a range of prices now, or if they're still "coincidentally similar" albeit slightly lower (hopefully) than before... 8)

Admittedly I have only done it on line going through a search which will cluster variety of shops under the same control and suprise suprise they all come out with exacctly the same price. The grade of ski varies from company but going for the middle standard of 3, they are all showing 146 Euros for a week skis only. More than Saalbach and Kitzbuhel so would this be noraml as I believe its an exier resort?

You can check the ski hire prices via the links on the tourism association website http://www.stantonamarlberg.com/en/winter/equipments-rentals-rates I would expect Hervis to be the cheapest, they have a "best price guarantee" and if you book online you can save 15% http://www.hervisrent.at/en/filiale/ski/st-anton-am-arlberg/ their midrange skis are €120 for 6/7 days.

Scarlet Fez wrote:
Anywhere you would recommend or avoid for ski hire

As mentioned Hervis was by far the cheapest .There was 12 of us looking to hire from skis only to Ski's,boots&helmets etc so spending around 1000+ Euros between us .
Intersports were next to our hotel and wouldnt offer any discount and wouldnt even price match there online prices ,this was the same for a few other shops.
So we headed to Hervis who are cheaper anyway and even got around 15-20% discount off there online price .We only hired for 5 days and Paid around 55-60 euros for ski/poles only .