"SOLL" Söll by keith750cc

Skiing holidays 2009 and 2010
The skiwelt is a massive area and included in the lift pass is skiing for any of the following villages, Going, Ellmau, Scheffau, Soll, Itter, Hopfgarten, Westerndorf and Brixen imThale. This basically means you have a massive ski area which caters for all levels of skier and boarder.

We stayed in Soll, so this is my focus, a lively apre ski village, with many places to stay, I can talk about three of them, one from this year and two from previous visits. Soll is a one and a half hour bus ride from Saltzburg airport and I would say approx 40 mins from Innsbruck.

Its a typical Austrian Village with all the usual charm, it has several ski shops including ski hire, 3 supermarkets of various sizes and a few bars and restaurants.

I would say it caters for all age groups, as a more mature skier, I didnt feel out of place in the bars, although one or two stayed open far too late for my tired body and limbs.

I nearly forgot, the Skiwelt mountain restaurants and facilities are excellent, clean modern, quite a few are new, we were very impressed by the whole Big Ski experience, new lifts this year, no long Q's as there are so many lifts and many have the rolling mat and seats in the Salvenbahn2 gondolas are heated. I have no idea how much (km) skiing there is in the Skiwelt, but if you keep the number of your lift pass and enter it in the correct place on http://www.skiline.cc/skiwelt it will tell you how many runs you had on each day and how far you skiied, how cool is that.

Because the Ski area is joined, please forgive me if I put in things that are not actually in Soll and as I keep remembering them as I go along, for instance the Funicular railway from Ellmau called the HartKaiser, there are two of them working in tandem on the same line, so again the Q's are soon cleared, well worth a trip over even for beginners its acheivable.

Staff and owners in the Silvenmoos Mountain restaurant are friendly and the whole place has great food and clean facilities.

Piste maps arent the easiest I have found to read and I wasnt the only one struggling.

Hire shops are helpful and friendly, last year we used the one close to the lift station, this year we used the one next to the Shindlhaus Apts, again no problems.

Atmosphere in the bars/pubs unfortunately is smokey as the ban does not seem to be in force here, but not a thing to stop you enjoying some great apre ski, live music in many of the bars and this strange ritual they have of Jagermeister time.

Soll and the skiwelt is not the most challenging place to ski and doesnt have the image of Whistler etc, but we have had 2 great weeks and dont see any reason why you shouldn't either

Julie & Keith on Zinsberg Jan 2009

Julie and me at the top of Zinsberg 1674 meters, look at that weather :)

HartKaiser railway lift

Well worth a trip over to have a ride and some good runs to boot.

• Pros:"Great Skiing, massive ski area, great hotels and bars"
• Cons:None that we could see
• In a nutshell:Soll is a great place to Ski and a great place to be