€66 Million and a Glacier That's Losing Its Superpower: Inside the Zillertal's Big Winter Bet

Nine cable car companies across one Tyrolean valley are pouring record sums into snow cannons, chairlifts and rock bridges. One of their flagship projects sits on a glacier that quietly gave up the very thing that made it famous.

Every autumn, Austria's ski valleys publish a ritual set of numbers: how many millions the local cable car companies plan to spend before the lifts start turning again. This year's Zillertal edition, confirmed this week, comes to roughly €66.25 million spread across nine operators — one of the larger regional tallies in a country where mountain lift investment has become a kind of annual arms race.

The single biggest line item, at €21.8 million, belongs to the Hintertux glacier area, together with neighbouring Finkenberg and Rastkogel, where construction is due to begin on a new ten-seat gondola called the Fernerhaus, alongside expanded snowmaking and a rebuilt beginners' area. It's a serious commitment to a resort that, for most of its history, sold itself on a claim no other Austrian ski area could make: that you could ski there 365 days a year.

That claim quietly died a few years ago — and the story of how is a useful lens on everything else in this year's spending list.

A glacier that stopped promising forever-winter

Until 2022, the Hintertux glacier was Austria's last true year-round ski area, its lifts running through every summer month on the Tuxer Ferner ice field. That changed as warm summers made the operation progressively less viable: 2023 brought the first scattered summer closures, 2024 saw a six-week shutdown from mid-August, and by 2025 the glacier was closed to skiers for two full months over summer. Ines Eberl, marketing head of the operating company, has attributed the shift to weak demand as much as anything else — summer visitors increasingly want hiking, biking and family activities rather than skiing in a heatwave — while acknowledging that persistently high temperatures, the loss of overnight cooling and changing snow and ice conditions on the glacier have made the operation harder to justify.

None of that has stopped Hintertux from remaining central to the valley's winter identity, or from absorbing the single largest capital outlay in this year's regional investment round. The new Fernerhaus gondola and expanded snowmaking are, in effect, a bet that the glacier's winter season — still marketed as the longest in Austria — can be defended with better infrastructure even as its summer season shrinks. It's the same logic driving cable car investment across the Alps: when the climate stops guaranteeing snow, spend more on the machines that make and move it.

Where the rest of the money is going

The other big-ticket item sits at Hochzillertal, where €12.2 million is funding a new Kashütte 2 drag lift, early groundwork for a Hochalmlift due to open in 2027, and a rebuild of the popular Kristallhütte mountain restaurant. At Mayrhofen, the valley's most terrain-famous resort — home to the notoriously steep Harakiri run and a well-established freeride and snowpark scene — the Mayrhofner Bergbahnen are spending €9.1 million, split between snowmaking upgrades, piste and trail work, and a new attraction called SkyWave, a rock bridge planned for the Penken area that continues the resort's pattern of pairing serious skiing with headline-grabbing thrill attractions.

Smaller operators make up the rest of the list, and their spending tells its own story about where the industry is putting its money: Hochfügen (€3.25 million) is adding a summer tubing run alongside new vehicles; the Spieljochbahn (€3.3 million) is doing preparatory work on a new Onkeljoch chairlift for 2027; Gerlosplatte/Hochkrimml (€2.5 million) is modernising a lift, reinforcing its power supply and expanding its snow-tracking software; and the Zeller Bergbahnen (€3.1 million) are investing in snowmaking and a nature-themed attraction called the Fichtenwelt. At the smaller end, the Eggalmbahnen (€645,000) are building a water-storage pond for snowmaking, and the Königsleiten lifts (€455,000) are adding snow guns and trail repairs. Two of the smallest entries — Gerlos and Königsleiten — belong to the Zillertal Arena group, the resort merger built up over four decades by Franz Hörl, the valley's best-known cable car figure and, for well over a decade, the public face of Austria's national cable car association.

A pattern with a name: snow security and summer insurance

Across all nine operators, two priorities repeat almost without exception. The first is snowmaking: expanded or upgraded snow systems appear in the plans for Hintertux, Mayrhofen, Gerlosplatte, Zeller Bergbahnen, Eggalmbahnen and Königsleiten alike, alongside investment in the software — like the Snow-Sat tracking system mentioned at Gerlosplatte — that lets operators manage snow depth in real time. The second is summer diversification: the tubing run at Hochfügen, the rock bridge at Mayrhofen, and the Fichtenwelt at Zeller Bergbahnen are all attempts to give the lifts a reason to run, and earn revenue, outside the ski season — even as Hintertux's experience shows that a hotter climate doesn't automatically translate into stronger summer demand for anything mountain-related.

The Zillertal's number inside a much bigger number

Nationally, Austria's roughly 250 cable car companies have historically invested somewhere in the region of half a billion euros a year into lift infrastructure and snowmaking, according to figures from the Fachverband der Seilbahnen, the industry's chamber-of-commerce association — a figure that has run considerably higher in some seasons, with the trade body citing outlays north of €700 million in at least one recent winter. The Zillertal's €66 million is, in that context, a meaningful regional share rather than an outlier: Salzburg's cable car operators and Vorarlberg's have both announced comparably large multi-year programmes in recent years, and the national association's own data credits modern snowmaking with helping the industry post around 54 million first-time lift admissions in the 2025/26 winter season and generate over €1 billion in value creation tied to reliable early-season openings.

That spending doesn't come free to skiers. Industry representatives have acknowledged that rising investment, along with higher energy and labour costs, feeds directly into lift ticket prices, which have climbed to the point that a single day pass at many larger Austrian resorts now comfortably exceeds €50 — even as, per the association's own numbers, roughly a quarter of that ticket price typically flows straight back into further infrastructure investment.

The bet underneath the bet

Strip away the individual projects — the gondolas, the drag lifts, the rock bridge — and what's left is a valley-wide wager that has become the default strategy for ski resorts across the Alps: that better engineering can outrun a warming climate for long enough to keep the business viable. Most of this year's Zillertal money says that bet is still being made with confidence. The Hintertux glacier's own recent history — a resort still investing tens of millions in its winter operation while gradually retreating from the summer claim that once defined it — says the bet doesn't always pay off in the way it once did.