Life in an Arlberg Town

A conversation with Anna Schranz

For generations, families have lived, worked and skied in this spectacular corner of the Austrian Alps. Today, St. Anton is one of the world's best-known ski destinations, connected by lifts and tramways to the extraordinary Arlberg ski area, including Lech, Zürs, Stuben and St. Christoph.

But behind the glamorous hotels, legendary après-ski and world-class skiing is something much more interesting: a real community.

To understand it, you have to talk to someone who grew up there.

Meet Anna Schranz, whose family has lived in the Arlberg region for seven generations. Anna was born and raised in St. Anton, works in her family's hotel, skis whenever she gets the chance and has watched her hometown evolve from a small Austrian village into an international ski destination. And despite having traveled all over the world, she still comes home. “Home is home.” That might be the best description of St. Anton you'll ever hear.

From Farming Village to Ski Capital

St. Anton wasn't always synonymous with skiing.

The villages around the Arlberg Pass originally developed around farming and transportation. The pass provided an important route for commodities such as salt and silver. Then everything changed. In 1885, the Arlberg Railway Tunnel opened, connecting the region by rail between Innsbruck and Zürich. Suddenly, St. Anton was accessible to travelers, mountaineers and — eventually — skiers. The Arlberg Ski Club was founded in 1901, and in 1907, legendary ski instructor Hannes Schneider began teaching skiing. Schneider would become one of the most influential figures in skiing history. His Arlberg technique helped establish a systematic approach to ski instruction, and instructors from the region later took those ideas to the United States, helping spread modern skiing across the Atlantic.

Growing Up in St. Anton

Today, St. Anton has only about 2,700 permanent residents. That's tiny compared with the number of people who descend on the resort during winter. For Anna, growing up there meant going to school with essentially the same group of local children. The community was close-knit, and the local ski club was one of the major social centers.

And naturally, skiing wasn't just something you did on vacation, it was what you did after school. Anna grew up in a family where ski racing was practically part of the DNA. Her father was a world champion ski racer, and she spent her childhood training, racing and skiing with friends. After school, she'd meet her friends on the mountain, train giant slalom and spend time with the local ski club.

The Winter Transformation

One of the fascinating things about St. Anton is that it has two personalities.

In summer, it is a small Alpine town. In winter, it becomes a city.

The permanent population may remain around 2,700, but thousands of visitors arrive, hotels fill, restaurants open and the mountain comes alive. Anna loves that contrast.

She enjoys interacting with international visitors and says she couldn't imagine doing her work somewhere without the winter season. And despite all the changes — new lifts, better connections and easier access between St. Anton, Lech, Zürs and St. Christoph — the local community remains remarkably rooted. The ski area may be interconnected, but the locals don't necessarily have time to explore it. During the winter, many work six days a week. Anna jokes that the locals are essentially “stuck” in their own towns because they're too busy working.

Then Everything Goes Quiet

Here's one of the strangest things about life in St. Anton. When the ski season ends, the town almost disappears. Anna describes the off-season as a kind of annual “little lockdown.” The seasonal workers leave. Tourists disappear. Hotels close. Restaurants close. The lifts stop running. Suddenly, the bustling international ski destination is quiet again.

The quiet season gives locals time to reconnect with family and friends. During winter, everyone is working so hard that friends joke they'll see each other again in April.

Then they do.

The Secret Weapon: Staff Housing

There's another major difference between St. Anton and many ski resorts in North America: employee housing. For many Austrian tourism businesses, accommodation is part of the job. At Anna's family hotel, staff live right there. Employees have their own rooms, and in some cases their own bathrooms. That matters.

In many U.S. ski destinations, finding affordable housing for seasonal employees has become a huge challenge. Workers can end up living far from the resort and spending hours commuting to work. In St. Anton, the traditional model is different. You work in the resort - You live in the resort - and, importantly, you can actually enjoy the resort.

Employees can receive significant discounts on ski passes if they stay employed locally for much of the season. At the time of the podcast recording, a season pass was around €1,000, with qualifying workers able to receive half the cost back after working for the required period. That creates an incentive to stay. And it helps build a more stable workforce.

Why People Come to St. Anton — and Never Leave

Of course, there's another reason people stay. They fall in love with the place.

Anna has seen plenty of seasonal workers arrive from England, Sweden, New Zealand and elsewhere. Some come for one winter. Then they meet someone, they make friends, they build a life - And suddenly they're not seasonal workers anymore. They're locals.

Anna herself has plenty of international friends, many of whom returned year after year. Some eventually moved permanently to St. Anton.

Anna's Perfect Day on the Mountain

So, where does someone who grew up in St. Anton actually ski? Interestingly, Anna doesn't describe some epic dawn-to-dusk powder mission. Her perfect day starts around 10 a.m. She heads up toward Kapall, where she can look down over the town, then skis around Galzig and St. Christoph. There's usually a good lunch involved.

Her favorite spots include the top of Galzig and the Adelberg Taja in St. Christoph. Sometimes just a few lifts are enough.

That's another useful lesson from a local.

You don't have to ski 40,000 vertical feet to have a great ski day. Sometimes you just need a few good runs, a spectacular view and lunch on the mountain.

Keeping the Austrian Soul Alive

Anna's family also runs the Karl Schranz Hotel, a property that perfectly captures another challenge facing successful European ski resorts. How do you modernize without losing the soul of the place? The answer at Schranz is a combination of old and new. Traditional woodwork, cozy interiors and fireplaces create the classic Austrian atmosphere guests expect. Modern touches — particularly in the spa — provide the comfort today's travelers want.

Anna believes the most important ingredient isn't architecture. It's people. Friendly, comfortable staff create the atmosphere that guests remember. And that may be the real secret of St. Anton. The experience isn't manufactured. It's passed down.

St. Anton Beyond Winter

St. Anton is also discovering that the mountains have plenty to offer after the snow melts.

Anna's family hotel now operates in summer after taking a decade-long break from the season. The response surprised them. Summer visitors are arriving in significant numbers, particularly families, hikers and cyclists.

E-bikes have changed the equation, making it easier for more people to explore the mountains without needing the legs of a Tour de France rider.

Hiking, mountain biking and hut-to-hut adventures are becoming increasingly popular.

Some guests even leave their luggage at the hotel, head into the mountains for several nights and return to the hotel afterward.

The Heart of the Arlberg

For skiers, St. Anton is legendary. The skiing is extraordinary. The Arlberg is enormous. The après-ski is famous. The lifts are modern, and the connections between the villages make it possible to explore a huge amount of terrain.

But Anna's story reveals why St. Anton is more than a ski resort. It is a living community with families who have been there for generations, workers who return year after year, newcomers who become locals and businesses determined to preserve the traditions that made the town special.

Contact Anna - Karl Schranz Hotel https://www.hotelkarlschranz.com/

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Where to Ski with me, your host, John Morgan. Today's bonus episode is a new twist on Where to Ski. Occasionally, we'll start exploring the culture, history, and future of mountain towns.

St. Anton is in the Austrian state of Tirol. It's in Western Austria, high up in the Tyrolean Alps, with aerial tramways and chairlifts covering the whole Arlberg region, which includes St. Anton, Lech, Zürich, Steuben, St. Christoph, and numerous smaller towns. Now it's a popular winter and summer resort among skiers, trekkers, and mountaineers.

But it wasn't always that way. To understand St. Anton and its close neighboring towns, you have to understand the evolution from farming villages to a unified international ski resort. Mostly due to the location of the Arlberg Pass, these towns facilitated the transport of commodities like salt and silver to augment their agricultural roots.

Then in 1885, the Austrian railway system opened a tunnel through the Alps, the Arlberg Railway Tunnel, with St. Anton becoming a major stop on the route between Innsbruck and Zürich. With the railroad came visitors, among them skiers and mountaineers. In 1901, the Arlberg Ski Club was founded.

In 1907, Hannes Schneider started teaching skiers. The advent of surface lifts in Zürich in 1937 and the opening of the Galsingbahn in St. Anton in 1939 helped skiing really take off. Also in the 1930s, Schneider and many other ski instructors from the area emigrated to the United States to help popularize the sport and spread Schneider's Arlberg progression.

Although connected by roads in the 1940s and 50s, it wasn't until the 2000s that the multiple villages started to be really, truly connected by trains, tramways, and chairlifts. So what's it like to see all these changes and to be born and raised in this area with its small towns and rapidly evolving culture? What makes the Austrian town like this different from the large resorts in the U.S.? How do they address some of the issues confronting ski resorts today, like attracting and maintaining seasonal staff, keeping traditions alive, while trying to grow and meet the needs of an international clientele? Let's find out from our guest today, Anna Schranz. Anna's family has lived in this region for seven generations.

She was born, has lived most of her life in St. Anton, and has seen many of the changes to the town. She is one of many who will be leaving St. Anton in the future. As an intelligent, cosmopolitan, hardworking mother, she works at her family's hotel in St. Anton, skis when she can, and travels.

Anna, welcome to Where to Ski, and thank you for sharing your experience growing up in the Arlberg. I imagine that life in a mountain town is very similar everywhere. I grew up in a small town in Vermont.

Everyone knew everyone. Very much a small town with a lot of new faces every year. What was it like when you were young? Was it a much smaller village then? It was not really.

First of all, thanks for having me on your podcast. I'm really excited and a bit nervous, but it was not much smaller. It was just, I would say, like the big hotels were there all the time.

We got some more hotels. We got some more houses with apartments. You know, you can rent apartments here as well, or just bed and breakfast.

That grew a lot the last years, but it's still small. Like our town doesn't grow bigger. We're still only 2,700 residents, like people who live here.

So it is quite small, but guest beds raised. Yes, they did. Did you grow up with sort of a core group of kids from St. Anton? Like at school you went to school with? Yes.

So like elementary school, of course, it's only the people from St. Anton. So yes, so you grow up with your friends. In school, they're all the same age.

So they're all from St. Anton. Nobody else goes. We have seasoners which bring their kids.

So it was like back in the days, not anymore. And they went to school with us just for the winter season. So we had a few extra kids in wintertime.

And then they left after the season, which was always fun. Like you get some new friends in winter, but then they have to leave again. Did a lot of the people you went to school with stick around St. Anton, or did a lot of them leave? Yes, yes.

No, most of them, like of course some left. They have different jobs. Not everybody works in the hotel or like restaurant business, but most of them are still here and they work here, either in ski shops or they have their own hotels or other businesses that are in St. Anton.

So they're all still here, yes. How about friends in some of the villages around like Stuben or Lack or any of that? Yeah, not that many. As we don't go to school together, the only thing that we have as a connection is our ski club, our racing club.

So we do train together. We race together. So then you get to know the other kids from the other towns.

Because like during winter season, you basically just stay in St. Anton. Like you ski here. We have like huge mountains here.

We don't have to go somewhere else. And our schools are here, like the elementary school. And I think, I don't know, do you say secondary school? I think it's here.

It's in St. Anton. So we basically stay here. So we only have our community here.

And Stuben and Lack is a federal state. Like it's another part of Austria. We are in Tirol and they are in Vorarlberg.

So they go in different schools as well. So it's more about like when we raced and we trained for the ski club than we were together. And then we got to know each other.

So I didn't know that about it. Did you grow up training and racing? Yeah, of course. I mean, I have a world champion dad in ski racing.

And yes, so that's basically what you do here. You go after school. You meet up with your friends for skiing.

And then you attend to the ski club. And then you have your trainings. You meet up on the mountain.

You have your giant slalom training. And yeah, that's what we do here for our hobby. Well, that's much different than the U.S. There's a lot of fun.

Most ski towns have got ski clubs. That's what a lot of the kids do. That's like our meeting up point, like going to the ski club.

You left St. Anton and went to university after. Well, it's not really university, but I left St. Anton. I went to a tourism school.

So in Austria, I think the school system is a bit different. We go four years of elementary school and four years of secondary school. And then we can choose different schools where we learn our profession.

So I went to tourism school then for three years. And that's where I basically learned how to cook. You need to learn everything there, like cooking, serving in a restaurant, doing the reception, and everything.

So that's what I did. You had a lot of options growing up, though. You could have gone pretty much anywhere.

And you travel a lot. Yeah, off-season, I traveled a lot, yes. And what brings you back to St. Anton every time? You've had a lot of chances probably to say, oh, it's beautiful here.

I'm going to stay. Yes, that's true. That's true.

Because I've been to Bali. I've been to America. Yeah, I've been everywhere in Europe.

Of course, everywhere it's nice. But I was always happy to come back home. Home is home.

So that's where I grew up. And I guess where I always come back. And you grow up in this really small town, as you mentioned.

In the beginning. But in the winter season, it's quite a city because of the many guests. So it's exciting.

I like to be here. I like to interact with all the guests. So I could not even do another job and do it somewhere else.

Because I think I need the winter season and the wintertime in St. Anton. Definitely. There's been a lot of, I've seen a fair number of changes in Anton over the years.

New lifts. Interconnection of the lifts. More roads.

More interaction with Lech and with Zuhrs and with Steuben. Has that changed the life around there? And how you interact with some of the people? Not really. Because, of course, we have more tourists.

Because the tourists can ski now to Zuhrs and Lech. Same for the guests. And Lech and Zuhrs can come to St. Anton.

We have more tourists. But the locals from Lech and Zuhrs or St. Anton, you know, it sounds weird. But we are stuck in our town for winter.

Because we work six days a week. Or like my mom, seven days a week. So, yeah.

Winter season is basically for yourself. You don't get to see many other people. Besides the tourists, of course.

But, yeah. Not other locals, no. That's not possible.

Because we're all hardworking. Now, you have sort of two seasons. You've got sort of December to April and then midsummer.

In the off season, when the services stop and the crowds and all the staff move away. Yeah. What do you think is about St. Anton when everyone's gone, when all the guests are gone? Well, to be honest, it sounds weird now.

But every mid-season or off-season, we have like a little lockdown. It is, you know, from one day to another, everybody leaves. All the seasoners, all the workers, all the tourists.

And then from one day to another, it's basically empty. And everything is closed. Like, all restaurants are closed.

All hotels are closed. The lifts are closed. Which is what's open.

The supermarket is open. And the gas station. And it's basically every year we have a little lockdown.

So, when we had the lockdown back in the days of COVID-2020, it was just simply like we just closed everything like every year. So, it's every year a little lockdown. But it's nice.

You know, you can calm down. Then you have time for your family and friends. And then you get to see your friends again.

Because in the beginning of the season, you don't have time. And we always say to each other, like my friends and me, so we see each other in April. Because everybody works hard.

So, yeah. But it's nice to have some off-season, even though it's quiet. So, when you get to the off-season, where do you like to go, you know, go back to your travel? Yes.

People in Colorado, for example, they take off in April and they go to Mexico or somewhere warm. Where do you go? Yes. We normally do that as well.

So, like I used to go to Bali or like somewhere warm, like really warm, where you don't have mountains or snow or anything. But these days, as you know, I have a daughter and my partner is from Belgium. So, I travel to Belgium then.

But then we do some summer holidays as well. Like we go to Italy, for example. That's our favorite place.

But back in the days, I traveled longer, like for a month or at least like three weeks. I'm going to sort of change direction a little bit. You have a lot of staff that come from other countries.

In the US, one of the biggest problems facing the ski resorts is there's no place to house them. So, you get to the big ski areas and sometimes they'll be driving for an hour and a half, two hours every day or on a bus for two hours just to get to work. It's a different approach over there.

You keep a lot of those people in town. Yeah, we have them in our hotel. They don't have to go anywhere.

They don't even have to leave the hotel. They have their staff room in our hotel. So, here in Austria or like the tourist areas, we offer the jobs with a free accommodation, which is really luxury.

Because, of course, for example, in Vienna, you don't get that. You get a job, but they don't care where you come from. But here, every hotel offers their staff room in town at least or at the hotel.

And we are lucky enough to have our staff in our hotel. They all have a single bedroom. They all have their own shower and own toilet, which is also luxury because not everybody has the possibility to give everybody a single bedroom.

But, yeah, we don't have that big problem with accommodation here because we have that since forever that we offer staff room with the job. That's interesting. In the U.S., this has turned into a big problem that the ski areas are not affordable for people who work there.

I know, yeah. Skiing is very expensive. They go there to ski and they live two hours away, so they can't take advantage of anything.

You really help them out a lot. If they come there and they want to ski, they also get discounts from the lift company. Yes, exactly.

If you buy a season pass, for example, at the moment, the season pass is 1,000 euros. But you have to work three months or three and a half months in one hotel or bar, restaurant, whatever. And then you get half the price returned.

So they get 500 euros back in the end of the season. But they have to show that they worked here for three and a half months in the same place. That's also like that helps us.

So people have a motivation to stay. It sounds weird, but, you know, people could also like just leave the places whenever they want to and say like, oh, I tried to find another job. But, yeah, that helps.

But they get a reduction, of course. Yes. In the U.S., it's a very transient population.

People move around a lot. You know, as you're saying, they stay for like a month and they leave. Do you get people coming back year after year that work for you? Yes.

Support staff? Yes. It got better now after COVID. Like right after COVID, it was really difficult to find staff.

But now we have like our kitchen, for example. We have them since over 10 years. Cleaning ladies as well.

Goran, our driver, we have a driver in our hotel. He's there since I'm a little child, since over 30 years. And the restaurant staff, we have regulars not coming every season.

Like, for example, now we have a waiter. He was here two seasons ago. So but they come back because I think we do offer a really good like work atmosphere.

Like they have a lot of free time. They have a lot of time to go skiing during the day. They have a good accommodation and a good payment as well.

That's a big difference from the U.S. How hard is it for those people that are moving to the Arlberg, the ones that weren't born there, to assimilate into St. Anton society? Do any of these like- You mean now the seasoners or like really moving to St. Anton? Really moving to St. Anton. Well, you know, people who moved to St. Anton been here and they fell in love with St. Anton. So that's why they moved here.

But like there's actually nobody who moves here and haven't been here before and don't know like the area or anything. I think it's quite easy for them because I think everybody who moves here is in love with St. Anton. A lot of seasoners, for example, they come here.

We have a good friend of mine. She's married to English. I hope I don't say the wrong New Zealand.

He's from there. He came to work here for the season and he stayed. They're married now.

They have two kids and a lot of seasoners do that. Like they either fall in love or like they just want to stay here. We have a lot of English people living here from England because they worked here before and didn't want to leave anymore.

Do you consider them friends, you know, like on a level with the kids you grew up with? Of course. Yeah. Like I have a lot of international friends because you do grow up with a lot of tourists and even like seasoners.

We have a lot of before the Brexit, a lot of English people coming here to work for the season and a lot of Swedish people. And yeah, you find people and like you become friends with them. Definitely.

And they keep coming back for the season. So you keep having those friendships over the years. Yes.

Do you see some of the, with people coming in from outside, do you see some of the social issues that affect other parts of Europe affecting St. Anton at all? No. No. I mean, we hear the news and everything, but like it doesn't, no, it doesn't.

It doesn't hit St. Anton. No. No.

Yeah. No. So what's your favorite time of year in St. Anton? That's a good question.

And I kept thinking about it. I think it's December, like the beginning of December coming to Christmas, when all the guests coming back, when it's snowy and when the Christmas lights are up everywhere and it has this romantic flair. And I really like the, like December.

It's really nice. And springtime. Springtime here is amazing.

When you're up on the mountain, you can sit in the sun, do a little bit of skiing. That's like my two favorite times. You do get to ski.

What's your favorite place to ski? What's your own favorite day? My own favorite day. I mean, I would, if it's possible, if I have a day off, I start like at 10 o'clock. We'd go up to Kapal.

That's a really nice mountain. You see the whole town and you have a really nice view up there. And then I like to just ski around Galtzig and St. Christoph.

That's like just here. Have a good lunch, maybe on top of Galtzig or at the Adelberg Taia. That's in St. Christoph.

Amazing restaurant. That's like, I don't get to ski like long sometimes, but like just a few lifts is already a good day for me. Now let's talk about your family's hotel, the Schranz.

It's a delightful spot. I've stayed there. And it combines traditional Austrian charm with some very cosmopolitan aspects to it.

How hard is it today to be able to keep that traditional part alive when you're running a cosmopolitan hotel and you're faced with all the realities of running a hotel? Well, it is quite easy because we want to provide guests the traditional atmosphere at our hotel. So it makes it really easy. Like you've been at our hotel.

It's really a lot of woodwork everywhere, which makes it cozy. But then we try to do some modern aspects in the spa area, for example. It's quite easy to combine.

I think what's really important to keep it traditional and keep it cozy because guests want to come to the mountain area and not be in a super modern house where it's just like, yeah, not a lot of coziness. So that's really important to have it cozy, to have like a little fireplace or like nice lights in the evening. I think some of it comes down to staff too and how they work.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, we are happy to have and we get a lot of compliments for our staff. They're friendly and nice.

So if they feel comfortable at the hotel, it gives the whole hotel a good atmosphere and guests keep telling us that. And we are happy that we have this good atmosphere. Now, you guys have started to open in the summer.

What kind of guests are you seeing in the summer? Is it a different crowd than the winter? Yes, it is. Like it's more families because, you know, like winter season, like we have a good skiing area, but for children, it's a bit difficult. So we have in summer more families than in winter.

And, you know, with the e-biking, everybody is capable now to go up the mountain by bike, which is amazing. And we have a lot of guests in summer now. We closed for 10 summers because it was not that busy anymore.

But then we opened up again and it's so busy. We didn't thought it's going to be like that. But a lot of hikers, like they want to go for nice walks in the woods.

You can go up with the cable cars and walk around on the mountain. So hiking and biking is like the main guests here. In some areas, there's like hut-to-hut hiking.

Is there a hut-to-hut up there? Yes, yes, you can do that. There are a lot of huts and you can do hut-to-hut. I don't even know if there's like an own guide, but you can do that.

We have guests sometimes checking in for one night and they leave their luggage here and then they do two or three days hut-to-hut and then they come back and enjoy two or three days at our hotel again. Now, can our listeners find you at the hotel? Yes, I mean, I try to be there every day. Since I have a daughter now with one and a half, she's a handful.

But I'm at the hotel every day so they can find me there. Or my mom or my sister, so it is really a family hotel. So one of us is always there.

Anna, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about your life in Saint Anton. During the season, you'll see Anna any day of the week at her family's hotel, with her daughter in town, or perhaps on the mountain taking a few laps in her spare time. We found the development of the region as an association of small towns has created communities dedicated to skiing in almost every aspect, creating and maintaining an ambience or vibe different from anywhere else.

This development path has given each small business proprietor significant ownership in the Arlberg experience, including a deep dedication to their traditions, to supporting their people, and to a superior service experience. It's also provided a framework for a friendly, in-town, on-the-hill competitive environment that helps keep costs in check and quality high. If you like our podcasts, please share them.

Visit our website at where2ski.org and listen to perspectives on other areas. Thanks for joining.

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