Galtur: The small but perfectly formed ski resort

When you’re searching for a winter sports holiday for complete beginners or young families, you don’t necessarily need a vast ski area with oodles of pistes or a well-known resort where your clients will spend longer in lift queues than they will on the slopes.

What they want is a hidden gem, a compact resort with easily-accessible nursery slopes, plenty of confidence-building green and blue runs for beginners and children to progress to, and a reputable ski school.

Galtur, a charming little village in the Austrian Tirol, is small but perfectly formed for first-timers and families. Its ski area is split into six separate zones dedicated to toddlers, teens, freeriders and downhill skiers, starting with a snowpark for little ones who can move on, when they’re ready, to Adventure Land, which includes an Enchanted Forest mini slalom through the forest.

There’s a funpark for teens, plus 40kms of downhill runs. Most are fairly easy reds, but there’s also a smattering of more testing black runs.

One of the problems of finding a resort to suit young families is that the parents are often already good skiers who want an extensive and varied ski area. While it’s true that 40kms isn’t enough to keep even intermediate skiers entertained for long, the resort also boasts lots of easily accessible off-piste, a picturesque cross-country track and snow-shoeing trails.

For those who itch for more action, the much larger resort of Ischgl is only about 15 minutes’ away by bus, giving access to another 238kms of runs. Further along the Paznaun valley is the resort of Kappl, which offers 40kms more.

You can buy a Silvretta Ski Pass that covers all three resorts plus See and Samnaun in Switzerland (accessible from Ischgl). The liftpass gives free access to a regular bus service that links all the resorts. However, beginners can save a lot of money by simply buying the local Silvapark Skipass that covers only Galtur.

Skiing in Galtur last week, one of the things I enjoyed most was the fact that pretty much all of the runs caught the sun all day long but, due to the height of the resort, the snow quality was excellent. True, some of the lowest runs were getting slushy by mid afternoon, but you could still ski all the way down to the village.

It’s a great choice for an end of season break and you can be confident that if you send clients there, there will still be snow right up to when the lifts close at the end of the Easter holidays.

Packages are available via a handful of UK tour operators including Crystal, Inghams and Neilson. The lifts in Galtur close on April 15 although you can ski in neighbouring Ischgl right up till May 1.

By Linsey McNeill