St Anton - Equipment Cartel?

I am travelling to St Anton on 1 January. In previous years, I have been able to keep cost of ski hire down by using one of the online booking sites. However, with St Anton, I seem to be coming up against a standard pricing for all hire shops.

Surely this is contrary to EU Competition law.

Anybody know anything about this or have any suggestions for ways of by-passing the local cartel?

Wanderer,
Yes, it doesn't matter where you go to in the Arlberg, or the Voralberg, or whatever method, direct or through an agent, what level of discount, and there are different levels, the bottom line always comes out the same.
There are coincidencies and coincidences.
So when I was there last year, and had started bonding with the locals, this subject came up.
It may not come as a complete surprise, that ALLEGEDLY, over an extended period of time, all the equipment hire shops have been bought up by the same family.
It does look suspicious, and my view at the time was that it should be a subject that might be of interest to the European Competition Authorities.

Not sure about St.Anton, but in Lech we managed to get 10% discount because my s-i-law showed her SCGB membership card.

This seems to be the situation a lot of big resorts. The European ski rental business is dominated by two organisations: Intersport http://www.intersport.com/company (turnover
€ 8.9 billion) and Sport 2000 http://www.sport2000international.com (turnover € 5.1 billion). They provide affiliated shops with purchasing and management services including rental equipment and the supporting infrastructure. In St Anton Intersport has four affiliated outlets as does Sport 2000, so it looks like they have the rental market sewn up. If you book online via http://www.intersportrent.at/winter/index.html?lang=en you can get a 5% discount and if you can get a promo code (reducsport2000 might work) you can also get 5% off at http://www.sport2000rent.at/en/rent/ One of the online booking agents http://www.snowrental.net/index.html (part of the TravelHorizon Group based in Aix en Provence) also offers discounted ski hire in St Anton.

SwingBeep, Skiset and one or two others have been quite clever in the way they have gone about their business, in general, selecting good hire businesses to deal with, and offering volume that they would not ordinarily get. Thus, in most places, they both compete, and force competition.
The point I made, is to look past the 5%, 10%, or whatever %, look at the bottom line. Also, the situation I described was not just in St Anton. It was across the whole of the Arlberg and the Voralberg. ALLEGEDLY.

We booked through Ski Total a trip to St Anton this winter, and the deal included 2-4-1 ski and boot hire by booking before a certain date. That is the way to do it!

Or, buy your own gear - if you go every year they'll soon pay for themselves...

There are 3 main sport shops in St. Anton, which all have a certain amount of branches, and yes the prices are more or less the same and it is not easy to get a discount. It is not a cartell and the big shops are owned by 3 different families.

BUT keep in mind what you get is: complete new skis and boots every season, freshly tuned after each use and the selection of skis are quit large.

Nice to see that the authorities have finally caught up with this. Hopefully, this might mean some opening up of competition and lower prices :!: