Austria, Again and Again: Ski Slopes and Thermal Spas

The country we return to most

Since settling in Vienna, we’ve come back to Austria more than any other country outside Croatia, and by now the pattern is obvious enough that it’s worth naming outright: this isn’t a country we’re still exploring corner by corner, it’s one we keep returning to on purpose. Between 2017 and 2025 our Austrian trips have settled into two genuinely different travel personalities — the lake-and-mountain Salzkammergut region, and the thermal spa belt down in Burgenland near the Hungarian border. They don’t feel like the same country at all once you’re in them, which is part of why both keep pulling us back.

Salzkammergut: our alpine base

Bad Goisern, tucked into the Salzkammergut lake district, has become something close to a home base for this whole region. We’ve stayed at Homebound Apartments Bad Goisern three separate times now — May 2023, September 2023, and again in March–April 2024 — which tells you plainly that we found something that works and kept using it rather than shopping around for the next town over. Bad Goisern sits centrally enough in the Salzkammergut that it makes a sensible launch point for the wider lake district: Hallstatt and its postcard lake are close by, the mountains rise straight up from the water, and the pace of a small Austrian town suits us better on repeat visits than constantly checking into somewhere new.

Around that Bad Goisern base, we’ve built out a wider loop of the region over the years. In June 2025 we did a proper ski-and-alpine-town circuit through Filzmoos (B&B Landhaus Vierthaler), Kaprun (Hotel Gasthof Mitteregger), and Villach (Comfort Apartments Villach) — three towns that each do something slightly different within the same alpine tradition. Filzmoos is a smaller, quieter ski village with sweeping views of the Dachstein range; Kaprun sits beneath the Kitzsteinhorn glacier and functions as a serious base for skiing well into the warmer months; Villach, down near the Carinthian lakes and the Slovenian and Italian borders, has more of a lived-in city feel alongside its own lake access. Earlier still, in May–June 2019, we based ourselves in Sankt Georgen im Attergau (Hotel Blumenhof) for a stretch that included a proper look at Innsbruck, Austria’s alpine capital in the west, with its old town wedged dramatically under the Nordkette range.

Burgenland: the thermal spa belt

The other Austria we visit is nothing like the first. Burgenland, hugging the Hungarian border in the country’s flat east, has built its tourism economy around thermal spring bathing rather than mountains, and the two towns we’ve stayed in there — Frauenkirchen and Loipersdorf bei Fürstenfeld — are both anchored by exactly that. In November 2017 we stayed at St. Martins Therme & Lodge in Frauenkirchen, one of the region’s best-known thermal resorts, and in January 2017 at Das Sonnreich – Thermenhotel Loipersdorf, another established Burgenland spa property. Both visits landed in the colder months, which is really the point: this is a region built for soaking in naturally heated water while it’s freezing outside, not for hiking or lake swimming.

Two regions, two seasons, one country

What we like about splitting our Austria time this way is that the two regions barely compete with each other for season or mood. The Salzkammergut and its neighboring alpine towns reward summer for lake swimming and hiking, and winter for skiing, with a shoulder-season sweet spot in late spring and early autumn when the crowds thin out but the cable cars and trails are still running. Burgenland’s thermal spas, by contrast, work essentially year-round, and if anything are more appealing in the dead of winter, when the contrast between the cold air and the hot pools is the whole appeal. Between the two, Austria gives us a genuine mountains-versus-water-cure choice within a few hours’ drive of Vienna, without ever needing to fly.

Why we keep going back to the same towns

There’s a temptation, when you live as close to a country as we do to Austria, to feel obligated to keep finding new places in it. We’ve mostly resisted that with Bad Goisern in particular. Returning to the same apartment building three times in under a year isn’t an oversight — it’s a deliberate choice to spend our energy on the region rather than on logistics, and it means we arrive already knowing the good bakery, the walking routes, and how the light falls on the lake in the evening. For us, at this stage, that kind of familiarity is worth more than novelty for its own sake.

[Editor’s note: add what keeps drawing you back to Bad Goisern specifically, and swap in your own photos of the Salzkammergut and Burgenland stops once you have them.]