National Park card scheme confirmed for 2012

One of the “joys” of running a business in Austria is dealing with the very different attitudes towards forward planning.  Basically it would appear that the Austrians simply don’t!   In a lot of ways it works because most of what happens around here follows tradition.  Everyone knows what happens when.  Whatever it is will be the same as last year and the same as every year.  Nothing wrong with that if we are talking about the local Kirchtag (bit like an English village Fete only with more beer).   The problem comes when we move on to wider issues.  Tourism has, in Austria, it’s own laws, these laws dictate amongst other things how the tourism taxes are used. We have known for some time that the existing laws are being replaced as of 1st January 2012 and the Austrians bless them thought it was perfectly OK to be still discussing how the new laws will work as we left for the bike show in November.  Not just the details mind, we are talking about the basic structure of the thing.

Now from our point of view one of the most important things was deciding just who would be running tourism and just what funding they might have.   Even as we were setting up our stand at the bike show we had no idea if we would even have a National Park tourism authority let alone be able to offer it’s National Park card to our guests.  This is where the forward planning (or lack of it) comes in.   We would have expected it to be considered vital to settle the new format at least a year in advance.  That way people like ourselves have some idea of what we have as marketing tools.  Sadly the Austrians don’t see it that way, sometime around May next year they will start thinking about  summer 2012  marketing.  Six months later they will be telling themselves that they must be satisfied with the number of visitors that summer.

We have just heard that a National Park Hohe Tauern tourism authority will exist in 2012 and that we will be able to sign up to the card scheme as before.   For those of you unfamiliar with the scheme it works like this; stay two nights or more and we give you (at no extra charge) a small card.  Present this card at the tollbooths of most of the high roads in Carinthia and get a free pass.  Many cable cars, mountain railways, boat trips on the lakes,museums etc are also free with the card.  The card represents incredible value for our guests, it’s very easy to save at least 10 Euros a day during your stay, more if you try hard.  Some guests have even managed to cover their entire bar bill with the savings they made!

That was the good news, the bad news at least from our part is that we are now being told that the costs to us for the card are going to be double those of last year.    This is were a bit of forward planning would have come in handy, our rates are set for 2012, we have published them not only on our website but on every one of the 5,000 leaflets we gave out at the bike show.   Now we might be old fashioned here but having advertised these rates we feel honour bound to stick with them.   Good job neither of us ever went into politics!   So what to do?  We can’t charge guests extra for the card as the contract says it must be included in the room price.    We can’t put those room prices up, no I will re phrase that, we won’t put those prices up so we only have one option.

Persuade more of you to come, it really is quiet simple, the economies of scale mean that the closer we are to full occupancy the lower the cost per head.  So to those of you who have already booked please bring friends.  To those of you who are thinking of booking please just do it.   And to the rest of you, hang on a minute-there are no rest of you-if you did not fit into the “have booked” or “are thinking of booking” catagories I doubt you would have read this far!  Anyway as you can see what we need is for loads of you to come, have lots of fun, enjoy all the wonderful things you can do for free with the national park card and then tell your friends.

We would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, here is our favorite seasonal message of 2011!

Oh, and a Happy New Year to you all.

Only three months now until we can get our bike back on the road!