Obereggen's New Eight-Seater Chairlift Leads a Fresh Round of Dolomite Upgrades for 2026/27

Work is underway in the Val d'Ega, in Italy's South Tyrol, on a lift replacement that sums up how ski resorts across the Dolomites have been spending their off-seasons lately: not chasing new terrain, but squeezing more people through the bottlenecks on the terrain they already have.

The new Obereggen chairlift, built by Austrian manufacturer Leitner, will replace the four-seater of the same name on a stretch of the Latemar-Obereggen ski area that sits along the connection to Val di Fiemme — one of the busiest crossing points in a ski area that links Obereggen, Pampeago and Predazzo under a single lift pass. The new eight-seater will run 500 metres, climb a vertical rise of 93 metres, and move up to 2,800 people an hour at 4.5 metres per second, cutting the ride to under two minutes. It's due to be running in time for the resort's opening day.

The lift is one piece of a €14 million package of works planned for the Obereggen-Latemar area this winter. The other headline addition is the Eben ski lift, a 479-metre drag lift with a capacity of 720 people an hour, built to serve a fully rebuilt children's snow park — "Brunoland" — at Obereggen's valley station, with an emphasis on comfort and safety for young families. The resort is also adding "Latemar Fun Lines," a set of playful runs built around banked turns, rollers and small jumps, aimed at skiers looking for something less serious than a groomed piste.

"These new lifts are two fundamental pieces of a broader project to replace our uplift infrastructure," said Benjamin Kirchmaier, CEO of Obereggen Latemar SpA, in comments reported by ski-industry outlet DoveSciare, framing the work as part of a wider redevelopment centred on the Obereggen valley station. He pointed to rising demand from both Italian and international visitors choosing the Latemar Dolomites area for their ski days as the rationale for continued investment in lift quality.

The 2026/27 ski season at Obereggen-Latemar is scheduled to run from November 28 to April 4.

Part of a Much Bigger Pattern

Obereggen's upgrade isn't happening in isolation. It's the latest instalment in a spending pattern that has become almost routine across Dolomiti Superski, the cooperative of roughly 130 lift companies spanning twelve interconnected ski areas across South Tyrol, Trentino and the province of Belluno — together comprising close to 1,200 kilometres of piste served by around 450 lifts.

Last season alone, the consortium's operators put in place 13 new or replaced lifts across nine of its twelve ski areas, backed by a combined investment north of €215 million — including roughly €60 million for the Dolomites' first 3S gondola, the Col Rodella lift linking Campitello di Fassa in Val di Fassa. Even by the standards the region has set for itself in recent years, when Dolomiti Superski's collective infrastructure spending has regularly topped €150-200 million per season, that was a big number, and this year's Obereggen works are being carried out under the same underlying logic: swap out ageing, lower-capacity chairs and drag lifts for faster, higher-capacity machines at the exact points in a ski area where queues tend to form, rather than expanding the skiable footprint itself.

That logic shows up elsewhere in the region this year too. Plan de Corones (Kronplatz), one of Dolomiti Superski's flagship areas, has three new lifts and fresh terrain planned for 2026/27, while smaller resorts such as Belpiano-Schöneben have works of their own underway. It's a reminder that in a mountain range where nearly every viable valley has already been developed for skiing, the competitive edge increasingly comes down to how quickly a resort can move people from the base to the slopes — and how comfortable that journey is once they get there.

A Season That Starts Almost Everywhere at Once

Obereggen's November 28 opening lines up closely with the rest of Dolomiti Superski, where the network's constituent areas — Cortina d'Ampezzo, Plan de Corones, Tre Cime, Val di Fiemme-Obereggen, San Martino di Castrozza and others — traditionally begin opening lifts in the final days of November, with the interconnected Sellaronda valleys following in early December. For skiers weighing where in the Dolomites to spend their season, the throughline this year is less about any single new lift than the sheer density of them: across the range, ageing chairlifts and drag lifts built in the 1980s and 90s are being quietly retired one valley at a time, replaced by machines built for a different scale of visitor traffic than the ones they succeed.

Obereggen's own history follows the same arc — the lift now being replaced was itself a 2006 addition, on a line that has carried skiers toward Val di Fiemme for two decades. Its replacement is designed to do the same job for the next two.