Our southern neighbours have taken hotel-keeping to world-class level. Because this is not only about skiing. This is about the art of hospitality. It has its beginning back in the days of Ernest Hemingway, writes wellness expert Natascha Kames for ZEN.

I came to Austria as a young emigrant in the 1980s, by a detour through Sweden and Germany. I dreamed of America, and Austria with its status of a “neutral country” did not seem very sexy to me as a young anti-communist. But in the end I stayed there, only a notional step beyond the barbed wire. Why? Because in Austria things are simply… easy.

I fell in love with Vienna. Vienna is different from other big cities. And that is why it leads them. In the prestigious Quality of Living Survey it has twice taken first place among 221 big cities. Coffee houses, schnitzel, heurige, monuments, Lipizzaners, beaches on the Danube, low crime and greenery produce a contradiction: a big city that is not hectic.

And what is a heurige? Thanks to the Pannonian climate (colder winters and warmer summers with less rainfall than ours) and the position on the Danube, the vines thrive on the 680 hectares of vineyards that adorn the slopes of Vienna's hills. Right by their vineyards the winegrowers keep their own taverns, the heurige. The word does not mean only a wine tavern, however, but also the wine of the current vintage, which may be called that only until 11 November, St Martin's Day.

Blessed be Emperor Joseph II, who by a decree of 17 August 1784 allowed everyone to pour and sell wine from their own vineyards. Since then these taverns in Vienna have been open only for a certain part of the year, and in some places the establishments even take turns in their opening times month by month, so that every winegrower gets a share. You recognise a genuine Viennese Heuriger by the bunch of pine branches hung out over the street and by a sign reading “Ausg’steckt”, which at the same time says when the place is open.

Rio on the Danube

Woods, parks, gardens and sports grounds make up a full half of the city's area. While the inhabitants of other capitals have to travel far for untouched nature, the Viennese only need city public transport or the excursion boat Nationalpark Boot, which runs (from the beginning of May to the end of October) on the Vienna canal from the city centre to the eastern part, where the Donau-Auen park stretches along the Danube. Vienna is the only city of a million inhabitants in the world that has its own national park.

Nature, thanks to the Danube but also in the city centre, is one of the greatest attractions. It is true that unlike Prague, where the Vltava flows through the centre, Vienna originally lies only beside the Danube. But since the 1970s, when flood protection was improved so much that floods stopped threatening the city, a 21-kilometre-long island has been built in the middle of the Danube along the whole length of the city. It created a parallel arm of the Danube, the so-called New Danube. 42 kilometres of beaches came into being, which made Vienna the Rio de Janeiro of Central Europe. You reach this eldorado from the city centre, from Stephansplatz, by the U1 underground line in eight minutes. And you can swim and sunbathe on the beaches, sail, water-ski or skate, or simply walk along the shore, which is full of bars and small shops.

Vienna and the Viennese welcomed me, a girl from the socialist camp, more warmly than the cooler Swedes and the self-confident Germans. I never had the feeling that they needed to put people into castes, and they have a sense of humour similar to ours. Perhaps because Vienna lies geographically a little further east than Prague. “Not letting an Austrian criticise something is like castrating him,” said the well-known sex counsellor Gerti Senger. 

Compared with the Czechs, however, Austrians are less boorish and always come to dinner at the hotel in an ironed shirt. Austria is imbued with a healthy conservatism, so although corruption and sloppiness do not pass it by either, they do not flourish as they do here, because it is “simply not done”. Although Austrians are not extremely hard-working, they have built a state so stable that they have one of the highest living standards in Europe. And if the people of Salzburg once expressed a wish to become part of Germany and Vorarlberg tried to defect to Switzerland, now they are all glad to be Austrians.

Austrians like their northern neighbours, of that I am convinced. Certainly more than the Germans or the English. We are known to be a sporting nation and to bring hoteliers a decent income in winter. When we set off for the pistes, we are among the first there. When we take a cycling holiday, we can swallow the kilometres. Austrians are impressed that we do not fake our sporting enthusiasm. We do not behave noisily like Russians, Romanians or Germans. And when we are satisfied, we are not sparing with the Trinkgeld, the tip. As one waiter told me: “A German says strictly ‘ein Bier’ and a Czech ‘Bitte, ein Bier’.” That is also why more and more Czechs and Slovaks are getting jobs in Austrian hotels.

Czechs have a reputation as hard-working and cultivated neighbours, which of course supports the connection between our cultures. Strudel, schnitzel, dumplings and a passion for pre-Christmas markets, all that makes us brothers. Austrians come to us more and more often, to picturesque South Bohemian Pensions and for golf, because it works out cheaper for them.

A big world for the little ones

The Austrian feel for comfort is most visible in tourism. A hundred years ago, when Ernest Hemingway was among the first foreigners to discover the beauty of Austrian skiing, people in poor mountain villages realised that if they gave guests good service as well, the guests would come back – as Hemingway did in his day. And it still works that way today. Huge complexes have grown up on the site of the former modest mountain cottages. 

Karl J. Reiter, a legend of Austrian hotel-keeping, who in 1982 opened the country's very first wellness hotel in Tyrol thanks to his experience from the USA, says: “Life in the Alps was modest. And the farm was always inherited by only one son, while families had a lot of children back then. Business in tourism was one of the few things where you could succeed. And we were used to working hard.”

Reiter's father owned a small Pension; he himself has three wellness hotels, and his resort in Südburgenland won the award for the best golf hotel the year before last. These are two connected hotels with their own thermal baths (the largest in Europe), where children may not enter one and adults without children may not enter the other. In the first you will find a restaurant with Michelin stars; in the second the children have their own theatre, where with excellent carers (usually at least one speaks Czech or Slovak) they rehearse a different performance every week, run creative workshops during the day, hold their own lunches and dinners in a special children's restaurant, and when they are not playing they ride a pony in the local zoo. 

In such a hotel you not only get a break from your child, the child also learns quite a lot! (In another Alpine hotel, by contrast, they hold dinners where everyone eats from one giant bowl, so that a family that may not have much time for each other during the year is brought together as closely as possible.)

With children you drink for free

The wellness wave reached Europe from America in the 1980s, and tourism, which makes up a fifth of Austrian GDP, jumped on it briskly. Hundreds of hotels now offer excellent wellness programmes. It is a pity that most Czechs have not yet grasped that Austria is not only skis and the cheapest possible accommodation. Anyone who pays extra and stays in a four- or five-star hotel will realise with astonishment what a perfect pleasure a “sauna village” can hide. 

While in Italy you have one sauna even in a good hotel, and it often smells somewhat, an Austrian hotel will offer you ten. In Übergossene Alm, one of the hotels that met the required 85% of the 1600 criteria for the prestigious Best Wellness Hotels Austria label, you have a steam bath, a herbal sauna, a devil's or extra-hot sauna, a tepidarium (with heated marble loungers), a caldarium or a laconium in the style of a classical Roman bath with stone benches and walls radiating a temperature of 48 °C.

In one hotel kung-fu masters do the exercises and the massages, in another they focus on medical wellness, so during a week's stay they may perform eyelid surgery on you. Elsewhere they have lympho-wellness, which in other words means a diet programme. From such a hotel you leave after a week a few kilos lighter and richer by the information from a course on fat-free cooking.

You recognise the best hotels by the fact that their hoteliers are generous. In his Best Familien Hotel, Karl J. Reiter has a bar and a wine cellar equipped so well that many an establishment in the centre of Prague could envy him. And because it is a hotel for families with children, at ten in the evening incompatible worlds mingle quite happily in the elegant lobby: gentlemen sit on bar stools with their offspring toddling at their feet; behind glass there is a superbly equipped smokers' corner a la English club. And at the bar you drink whatever you please. Here the alcohol is included in the all-inclusive price. 

I met an acquaintance here who, as I knew, had had grown-up children for a long time, and I said to him: “But adults without children are not allowed in here.” And he replied: “You borrow a grandson and you can drink here for free!”

Text by: Natascha Kames

Source: E15