Kitzbühel opened its season on last winter's snow, and is spending €36 million betting that there will be many more winters to come.

On Friday morning, a 600-metre ribbon of piste on the Resterkogel above Pass Thurn made KitzSki the first non-glacier ski area to open this season. The snow underneath is last winter's: gathered in spring, buried under fleece and foil through the summer, and spread out again this autumn. During the week it belongs to race squads. At weekends it is open to everyone, with the next public weekend on 14 and 15 November.

It is neat theatre for a company that has just finished something far bigger a few kilometres away. At a press event at Bogner's Munich headquarters, the Bergbahn AG Kitzbühel said it had put about €36 million into snow security and guest comfort this financial year. The centrepiece is a new reservoir, and its story says a good deal about where Alpine skiing finds itself in 2026.

The lake in the middle of the mountain

The Sonnenrast reservoir sits just below the top station of the Fleckalmbahn and cost roughly €16 million. According to figures released at its blessing on 16 October, it holds about 100,000 cubic metres, of which 95,000 are usable. It is the eleventh storage pond in the ski area, bringing the total to around 845,000 cubic metres. Seven of them in the core area are now linked, so water can be moved from one to another as demand shifts.

The pump station is the real machinery. It can feed up to 555 litres a second, about 2,000 cubic metres an hour, into the snowmaking network. Together with 15 cooling towers it delivers water at two to five degrees Celsius, which makes the snow guns work more efficiently. KitzSki says peak snowmaking capacity in this part of the mountain rises by more than 40 per cent, and stresses that the aim is not more snow overall but making better use of the short windows when it is cold enough.

Building it moved around 255,000 cubic metres of earth, which was reused nearby. Three pistes (nos. 18, 21 and 43) were reshaped, and a 65-metre ski tunnel now carries the blue Brunn run beneath the black Jufen run, removing a crossing the company calls dangerous and accident-prone.

Then comes the twist. From summer 2027 the reservoir is meant to open as a swimming lake with free entry, with jetties, a children's shallow zone, a small diving tower, a floating island, stand-up paddling and lifeguards employed by the lift company. Chairman Anton Bodner told local media there had been "not a single negative report or protest" during the project, which is his assessment rather than an independent finding. The lake also straddles the boundary between Kitzbühel and Kirchberg, a fact that has acquired a political edge (see below).

Why the water matters

Ulrike Pröbstl-Haider, a professor at Hochschule Kufstein Tirol who spent two decades at BOKU in Vienna researching tourism and climate change, and co-chaired Austria's 2020 assessment report on the subject, explains the logic. Modern snowmaking, she says, needs a base layer of 30 to 40 centimetres across the whole piste within about 72 hours, which takes a great deal of water at once. Ponds are mostly filled in the rainy summer, because drawing from mountain streams in winter would damage habitats. There is, in her words, hardly an alternative.

She is blunt about the limits. Snowmaking and reservoirs are, she says, "an expensive adaptation, and one with an expiry date", because the number of cold days suitable for making snow is shrinking even at around 1,000 metres. Her counterweight is that Austrian operators reinvest winter profits in infrastructure and summer offers, and that the real danger is where snow is scarce and reinvestment has been thin. She cites Lackenhof am Ötscher, facing closure not for lack of snow but for lack of money.

Tyrol's environmental ombudsman is also watching. Tiroler Tageszeitung reported on 1 November that snowmaking continues to be expanded across the province, and that doubts are growing over whether ski areas below 1,500 metres have a future.

The neighbours show what is at stake. In Kaiserwinkl, just across the district, the tourism association said on 4 November that a dry summer had left too little water for snow production, so only one machine-made cross-country trail will run this winter. It now wants to reactivate two groundwater springs, at its own cost with the two municipalities, to secure supply for ten years. Tyrol's own climate status report describes a province that is getting hotter and drier.

KitzSki's announcements do not say how full its reservoirs were after this year's summer, a question worth putting to the company.

A guarantee and a price tag

KitzSki is repeating its snow guarantee. For the premium season, 20 December 2026 to 13 March 2027, anyone who buys a one- to 14-day pass online by 19 December gets a proportional refund for days lost to lack of snow. The company says the Kitzbühel "grass mountains" need only 30 to 40 centimetres to make a stable, well-groomed piste.

The cost to skiers keeps rising. According to a comparison by the travel-deals site Urlaubshamster, reported by Leadersnet, the KitzSki adult day pass is €83 this season, against €58 in 2019/20, an increase of 43 per cent. A new pricing rule says the web-shop day ticket will always be at least a euro cheaper than the ticket window, whenever it is bought, and early-bird discounts of up to 20 per cent remain.

The business case is not hard to see. At its annual meeting in June, the company reported turnover above €72 million for 2024/25, its first time over €70 million, with a net profit of about €2.5 million. It counted around 1.42 million first entries in winter and more than 300,000 summer guests, and employed an average of 347 people. Board member Christian Wörister says the summer just ended was the most successful in company history, with first entries up about 15 per cent. The investment sum and the profit refer to different years, but the contrast shows how heavily the company is leaning on the future.

Beyond the pistes

The other big project is a new car park at the Fleckalmbahn. The old garage was replaced after 36 years for structural reasons. With the outdoor lot there are now about 1,100 spaces and 20 electric charging points, and a camera-based system shows free spaces at the entrance. The pass also includes free ski buses and the "Streifzug" regional train between St. Johann in Tirol, Kitzbühel-Hahnenkamm and Westendorf.

For race fans, the German Ski Federation's sports director Wolfgang Maier said at the event that big events leave lasting training conditions behind, and the area now offers a speed course at Pass Thurn and a technical piste on the Kitzbüheler Horn alongside Resterkogel. For families, there are ten free practice lifts in the valley, SnowX courses and snow parks. From 11 December the company takes over running the Wagstättalm in Jochberg itself.

The calendar

The season builds towards the 87th Hahnenkamm Races, 18 to 24 January 2027, on the Streif and the Ganslern slalom hill. Before that come the Bergadvent on the Hahnenkamm on 4 and 18 December, and a new Sound Escape season opener on 12 December, with a ski test by Atomic by day and a set by DJ Hugel at the Hahnenkammbahn valley station in the evening. After the races come Vertical Up on 27 February, a bigger Sound Escape on 11 to 14 March, and the Winter Woodstock of brass bands on 19 to 21 March. The first full ski weekend on the Hahnenkamm is planned for 21 November, with continuous operation from 27 November.

One lift company, two tourism boards

Behind the scenes, the lake is a symbol of a fight over where Kirchberg belongs. On 12 October, members of the Brixental tourism board met in Kirchberg. Of 2,400 members, 551 attended. A narrow 52 per cent backed opening talks about moving Kirchberg to Kitzbühel Tourismus. Kirchberg members were 88 per cent in favour, while 74 per cent of those from Brixen and 99 per cent from Westendorf were against. Without Kirchberg, the Brixental association would shrink by about half.

The chairman who pushed the move, Willi Steindl, has since been voted out, and Julia Mingler-Haueis now leads the Brixental board. Kitzbühel Tourismus chairman Christian Harisch calls the move a natural fit, since guests already see the two as one lift-connected area, and had wanted it done by 1 January 2027. The Brixental side says a rushed deal would harm the valley. A first exploratory round took place on 23 October and the next is set for 16 November in Kitzbühel.

A changing of the guard

Bodner retires in December. Gabriel Sieghartsleitner takes over as chairman of the management board, responsible for finance, operations, human resources and strategy, alongside Wörister and technical chief Florian Wörgetter. The company promises continuity with new impulses.

It will have plenty to manage. A lake built for skiing that doubles as a summer beach, a mountain with a stored-snow ribbon at its foot, and a price that keeps climbing: KitzSki is betting that heavy investment now will keep the white season alive. Pröbstl-Haider's warning is the other side of the same ledger. If the snow does eventually fail, the ponds will still be there, and someone will have to decide what to do with them.