Glungezer: a new €16 million lift and a 15 km run a quarter of an hour from Innsbruck
Sixteen million euros for a single chairlift at a resort with 23 kilometres of pistes and six lifts. That is the cost of the project due to open on the Glungezer in December, and at first glance the figure looks like a mistake. For comparison, a day pass here costs €50, roughly what you pay in the Beskids on New Year's Eve. And yet the sums add up; you just have to do them differently. Glungezer does not sell kilometres. It sells its distance from Innsbruck and the fact that it is the only mountain in the area where you can ski all the way down to the village without getting into a gondola.
Where exactly is the Glungezer
The summit stands at 2,677 m in the Tux Alps, on the south-eastern side of the Inn Valley. The valley station is in Tulfes at 950 m, eight kilometres from Hall in Tirol and 12 from Innsbruck. From the centre of the Tyrolean capital it is a 20-minute drive.
The resort spans 950 to 2,304 m, which gives a vertical drop of 1,354 m. Of its 23 kilometres of pistes, 6.5 km are blue, 15.5 km red and one kilometre black. That single kilometre is called Kanonenrohr, the cannon barrel. That says enough about its profile.
The ride up starts with the ten-seater Glungezerbahn I gondola, built in 2018, which reaches Halsmarter (1,560 m) in just under six minutes. From there the Tulfein Express, a combined lift from 2020, takes you up to 2,056 m. Before that, the same line ran for 53 years in a configuration you will not find anywhere today. In summer it was a single chairlift, in winter a T-bar. The same cable, two different lifts depending on the season.
Higher up there is also the Schartenkogellift, a double chairlift that runs to 2,304 m. This winter it takes centre stage. It is on its way out.
Schartenkogel Express: what exactly is being built on the Glungezer
The old double chair is being replaced by a detachable six-seater chairlift with bubbles and heated seats, supplied by Leitner. The valley station will stand on the site of the disused bottom station of the Kalte Kuchl T-bar at 1,752 m, and the top station right on the summit of the Schartenkogel at 2,304 m. Length about 1.75 km, vertical rise 552 m, speed 6 m/s.
The key figure is ride time. The old double chair took about 20 minutes to the top. The new lift will do it in six. The manufacturer quotes 5 minutes 20 seconds, the municipality more cautiously says six, but the order of magnitude is the same. The upper part of the resort stops being an expedition you commit to once a day.
The new lift is also longer than its predecessor because it starts lower down. That makes it possible to reopen a section of piste no. 3, which became unskiable without a lift after the Kalte Kuchl T-bar was removed, and to use the old T-bar track. After this work the resort should grow from 23 to 24 kilometres of pistes. The lift will run only in winter, because in summer the first two sections are enough.
A panoramic restaurant with 120 seats is going up next to the top station. And here is the catch that gets lost in most announcements. At the end of August the mayor of Tulfes, Martin Wegscheider, said plainly that this year only the weatherproof shell will be finished and the restaurant will not open until the following season. Anyone who comes in the 2026/27 winter will find a new lift on the Schartenkogel and a closed restaurant.
The season is scheduled to open in mid-December 2026.
Where does a small resort find €16 million
This is the part of the Glungezer story that interests me most, because of the mechanism it shows.
The old Schartenkogellift was built in the 1990s and its licence was due to expire in 2029. A refurbishment was judged not worth it, because the lift was simply outdated. The resort faced a simple choice: either invest, or in three years lose the entire upper half of its terrain.
It chose to invest, but there is no private investor here putting up money and counting on a return. The lift company was bought back from a private construction firm in 2010 and has since been owned by three parties: the municipality of Tulfes, the Hall-Wattens regional tourist board and the local Agrargemeinschaft, a commons association of those entitled to use the village's shared land. The three hold almost equal stakes, so no owner can outvote the other two.
The original estimate was €13.5 million; today the talk is of about €16 million. The total is made up of a €10 million loan, €2.7 million from the tourist board, €1 million from the Tulfes municipal budget, €450,000 from partner municipalities, half a million from a national support programme for small resorts and the rest from the company's own funds. A total of 19 neighbouring municipalities were brought into the talks, and a crowdfunding campaign was also planned.
In practice, then, the Schartenkogel lift is being paid for by the whole district. It is a model that has worked in Tyrol for decades and explains why small Austrian resorts are not dying at the rate comparable resorts are disappearing in other Alpine countries.
There is one more thread to this project that the press releases do not make much of. The Schartenkogel and Kalte Kuchl area is terrain where a balance between off-piste skiing and the protection of grouse has been sought for years. The project needed a separate nature conservation permit on top of the geological, forestry and water permits. Higher capacity at the top station will not ease that tension.
A 15 km descent and a piste that once hosted a World Championship
Glungezer advertises one of the longest runs in Tyrol. Depending on the variant you choose, it comes to up to 15 kilometres, from the top station at 2,304 m all the way down to Tulfes. The upper half is red, the lower half blue, which in practice means a beginner can ski it too, provided their legs can handle 1,354 m of vertical in one go.
This is where the Glungezer becomes more than a local hill.
In February 1933 Innsbruck hosted the third Alpine World Ski Championships, then still known as the FIS races. The slalom was held on the Seegrube below the Hafelekar. The men's downhill was raced here. The start was below the Glungezer summit, the finish in the Inn Valley, 14 km long with a vertical drop of 2,000 m. There were 94 starters from 12 countries.
The details of that race sound unreal today. There was no lift, so the racers climbed to the start on foot. Because of a lack of snow, the finish had to be moved higher up, to Tulfes, which is why the village still calls itself a World Championship venue. On race day it was raining in the finish area, and after the first starters the thin cover turned into a mix of snow and earth. At the start, meanwhile, heavy snow was falling.
The Glungezerhütte mountain hut at 2,610 m was built for that very event, in 1932, as a wooden start hut. A year later it was replaced by a stone building, because 30 sq m proved laughably small for the traffic that followed. Since 1951 the hut has belonged to the Hall in Tirol section of the Alpenverein. Red piste no. 2 on today's resort map is called FIS-Standard-Abfahrt, and it is not a marketing name dreamt up by an agency.
The Glungezerlauf mountain race is still held here, starting at the church in the valley and finishing at the hut: 15.5 km with 2,120 m of ascent. It is the longest mountain race in Austria.
Ski plus City Pass: when the regional pass starts to pay off
Glungezer sells its own passes and is also part of the Ski plus City Pass Stubai Innsbruck. The difference between the two options is more interesting than it seems, so it is worth sitting down with a calculator.
The resort's own price list for the 2025/26 season came down to three figures: a day pass at €50, six days at €255 and a season pass at €447.50. Prices for 2026/27 had not been published at the time of writing, so treat these figures as a reference point, not a promise.
The six-day Ski plus City Pass for the 2026/27 season costs €386 for an adult, €193 for a child and €270 for a youth. It covers 12 resorts around Innsbruck and in the Stubaital: the Stubai Glacier, Axamer Lizum, Schlick 2000, Kühtai, Hochoetz, Muttereralm, Nordkette, Serlesbahnen, Elferbahnen, Patscherkofel, Rangger Köpfl and the Glungezer itself. Together that is 265 km of pistes, 49 km of off-piste routes and 108 lifts. The pass is sold for two days or more, and the 2026/27 season runs from October to April.
The maths is simple. Six days on the Glungezer alone cost €255, six days across the whole region €386. The difference is €131, the equivalent of just under three day passes, and in return you get eleven more resorts, including a glacier open from October to May.
For a skier going for a week with seven nights, so six days on the snow, the conclusion is clear. Buying only the Glungezer pass for the whole stay makes sense only if you plan from the outset to ski with small children in one place and never drive anywhere. In every other scenario the regional pass wins hands down.
What the price list does not show is the city part, and that is what can save a rainy day. The pass includes 22 attractions in and around Innsbruck, among them Swarovski Crystal Worlds in Wattens, the Alpenzoo, the Hofburg, the City Tower, Bergisel, Ambras Castle, the Golden Roof museum, the Grassmayr bell foundry and Hasegg Castle with its mint in Hall in Tirol. From Tulfes it is 10 km to Wattens and eight to Hall, so the two nearest attractions on the list are practically round the corner. Ski buses and the Sightseer city tour bus are also included.
How to get from Innsbruck to the Glungezer
By car it is 20 minutes from the centre. There is a car park at the valley station, but for years the municipality has been trying to cut traffic in Tulfes, and to that end it has done something I consider one of the more sensible ideas in the Austrian Alps.
Bus 4134 stops right by the valley station, running twice an hour between Innsbruck main station and Hall in Tirol via Aldrans, Lans, Sistrans, Rinn and Tulfes. The stop is called Tulfes Glungezerbahn Talstation and is a few dozen metres from the gondola entrance. The ticket office refunds the fare when you buy a ski pass. To get the return leg refunded too, buy a return ticket straight away and show it along with the first one. In older timetables and brochures the same line still appears as number 540.
The bus also passes Ambras Castle, which is included in the Ski plus City Pass. For an extra quarter of an hour you can tick off one of the pass attractions on the way back without changing to anything else.
The nearest airport is Innsbruck-Kranebitten, about 25 km away. By car, you take the A12 motorway along the Inn Valley and leave at the Hall Mitte or Wattens exit.
What to do on the Glungezer besides skiing
A toboggan run leads from Tulfein to Halsmarter: 3.3 km, 441 m of vertical, ten bends. Toboggans can be hired on site, and the run is sometimes floodlit in the evening. The evening ticket is valid from 16:30 to 22:15 and cost €42 last season.
The same ticket covers evenings for ski tourers. Skinning up is allowed on Tuesdays and Thursdays until 22:15, along a marked track on the old T-bar line, so as not to get in the way of the piste bashers. Ski tourers are a customer group in their own right here, not an afterthought. The resort sells a separate season pass for them, for tobogganers and for snowshoers, limited to four rides a day, at €223.50.
Tulfes has kept a local tradition called “klumpern”: riding single-runner sledges, which you can try on Thursdays and Fridays from 19:00 on the floodlit practice meadow.
Snowmaking now reaches the Schartenkogel top station, with water from the Zirbensee reservoir, built in 2019 above the Tulfeinalm at about 2,080 m. For a resort facing north-west with 26 hectares of pistes, that is surprisingly solid back-up.
In summer people come up mainly for the Zirbenweg, a trail through the largest continuous stone pine forest in the Alps towards the Patscherkofel. At the mid-station there is the Kugelwald, a world of marble runs for children.
For food there is the Alpengasthof Halsmarter at the mid-station, the Tulfeinalm and the Tulfer Hütte higher up, and for those with stamina the Glungezerhütte at 2,610 m, which serves Nepalese cooking alongside Tyrolean classics because its host comes from the Solukhumbu region below Everest. I could not have made that up.
Who the Glungezer is for, and who it is not for
I will be blunt. The Glungezer is not a destination for a week's trip if you count kilometres. You will have skied those 23 km in a day and a half, and by the second afternoon you will be getting bored.
It is, however, a very good idea in three situations. The first is a base in Innsbruck or Hall in Tirol with the regional pass. The Glungezer is then one of 12 stops, and the quietest of them, good for the day after a night in town or for a day of poorer weather, because the lower slopes are wooded. The second is a family with children who need wide, quiet pistes, short lift queues and the practice meadow at the mid-station. The third is a stop on the way. If you are driving along the Inn Valley towards the Zillertal or the Ötztal, leaving the motorway costs you a quarter of an hour, and a day on the Glungezer is half the price of one in Sölden.
Its biggest weakness remains the aspect and altitude of the lower slopes. The valley run ends at 950 m, and that is the stretch that can be the first to disappear in a warm December and in April. Check the webcams before you set off instead of assuming that because they advertise 15 km, all 15 km are skiable.
Still, the 2026/27 winter is a special season here. The upper half of the resort gets a lift that cuts the ride to the Schartenkogel from 20 minutes to six, and that changes the rhythm of the day more than one extra kilometre of piste in the statistics.
Frequently asked questions
How much is a ski pass at the Glungezer?
In the 2025/26 season an adult day pass cost €50, a six-day pass €255 and a season pass €447.50. The resort also sells hourly passes and single rides, with one ride costing €14.50. The price list for 2026/27 had not yet been published.
Is the Glungezer included in the Ski plus City Pass?
Yes. The Glungezer is one of 12 resorts covered by the Ski plus City Pass Stubai Innsbruck. Six days for an adult cost €386 in the 2026/27 season and include 265 km of pistes, 22 attractions in Innsbruck and ski bus travel.
When does the new Schartenkogel lift open?
The Schartenkogel Express is due to start running when the season opens in mid-December 2026. The panoramic restaurant at the top station will only reach the shell stage this season and will not open until the following one.
How do you get to the Glungezer without a car?
Bus 4134 runs twice an hour from Innsbruck main station and from Hall in Tirol, stopping at the lift's valley station. The resort ticket office refunds the fare when you buy a ski pass, including the return journey if you buy a return ticket straight away.
Is the Glungezer suitable for beginners?
Yes. Almost 30% of the pistes are blue, there is a practice meadow with a T-bar and a magic carpet at the mid-station, and the longest run is marked blue in its lower half. The resort consistently presents itself as family-friendly.