Adrian & Sandra at our place Aug 2011

Open invite to join in a trip to Europe including our place – 4th to 18th August 2012

Adrian & Sandra,  who have stayed with us twice now (and helped us out at the recent NEC bike show)  are planning another visit this coming August.  They would like to invite others to join them, particularly anyone who are new to touring and would welcome some company.  To this end they have produced an info sheet giving details of their plans.  It’s a relaxed tour with no big mileage days  and an interesting route.  Please contact them direct if you are interested

Adrian & Sandra’s Europe Trip 2012

Well here we are in 2012 and already looking forward to the next summer season! Bookings are coming in thick and fast and as the BBC keeps reminding us that there are now less than 200 days to go until the Olympics start in London, just think how soon those high roads will be open!

Last weekend Malta hosted it’s annual ice-climbing festival and thereafter there are a few Hungarian skiing groups to sort out, but March and April will be when we will be concentrating on the long list of tasks that will get the hotel ready for our first summer visitors when we officially open on the last weekend in April. This year John has plans for re-painting bedrooms and updating the public areas in the guesthouse building as well as the routine tasks inside and out for sprucing up and making sure everything works as it should! A tall order on his own, even with me organising in the background! So this is where you might come in!

Fancy a cheap Spring break? We are hoping to recruit some willing volunteers to help out with the DIY. We are offering free board and lodging to anyone who would be willing to spend half their days with a paintbrush or tile-cutter in hand. That gives you time for skiing, walking or sightseeing the other half of the time. The ‘windows’ we have for the work are March 1st to 18th and March 24th to April 28th. Apart from the actual school holiday periods, there are some pretty cheap flights available and we would be happy to co-ordinate shared traveling if any of you would prefer to come by car. We also hope to have some fun and frolics and plenty of time for a beer in the evenings!

If you think you might be interested in getting involved – for a few days or a few weeks, whatever suits you – drop us a line, by E Mail or a message on our Facebook page and we will arrange to call you and have a chat. We don’t expect you to be a professional decorator or tiler (neither are we!) – enthusiastic amateurs are what we are looking for.

Ros.

Right that’s her done the sales pitch, now for the practical stuff:

Here is a list of tasks so you know what you are letting yourself in for.

The carpet on the upper stairs and some of the corridors need replacing, given our clientele clumping around in their power ranger boots we thought tiles were a better solution so  here we go

Remove carpets, tile 20 steps and around 100 square m of landings/corridors- mostly straight forward with few awkward shapes.

Redecorate some of the rooms, painting only – no wallpaper etc

Renovate some of the bedside furniture-mainly rub down an re varnish

Hang pictures

General maintenance to get the place ready for a busy season.

Plumb & wire in new washing machine-it will be one dedicated for guest use only.

Extend the wireless internet system so it works in all the rooms, some of the walls are well over a metre thick so a few routers will be needed.  This is one area where we really could do with some expert help.

Major extension to our so called flat-up to now really just a bed sit.  To be called “Gowers Towers”  the extension will consist of a proper kitchen and lounge plus a  bigger bathroom with an actual bath.  (my attempt to gross a few brownie points from Ros)

Tasks involved:

Level floor

Cut window opening down to take French windows (wall is a metre thick!)

Fit new doors and windows

make partition wall.

Plumbing and electrics

Plaster walls- we are going for a “rustic” look!

Tile floor

Enlarge bathroom to fit bath, move shower, fit new sink.

There is also the possibility of some work updating the kitchen-removing old units, fitting new but this is not certain yet.

Get all the summer stuff out of storage and ready for the sunshine.

As you can see it’s a lot of work hence the call for help. Nothing too technical though and from previous experience it can be a lot of fun too.

Our season kicks off at the end of April  so we have around 2 months (minus a week or so when we shall be back in the UK)

Please get in touch if you are interested.  And don’t forget there is a reason why it’s called a Working PARTY!!

John

First of all we would like to wish you a Very Happy New Year! Hopefully, despite the doom and gloom in the media, the Mayan predictions of impending disaster and the increasingily strange global weather patterns, we will look back on 2012 as another great year for biking, hiking and generally enjoying the Carinthian hospitality!

We already have quite a full calendar and there is still more to come, but just as a taster, here are some of the events planned for this year:

Jan 13th to 15th Malta’s Annual Ice Climbing Festival – Eis Total – is the first big event of the year. Its not too late to get a last minute flight and register for what is always a really international affair! Happy to help out if the registration in German proves difficult – give John a call on the hotel number – 0043 4733 211.

Feb 23rd to 26th Motorbeurs in Utrecht. John and I with the usual suspects (Jane, Martin & Leigh) will be in Hall 11, Stand G024 encouraging some more new Dutch, Belgian and French bikers to come and try out our great biking roads. This year we will have a new neighbour at the show – Dave Milligan from Get Routed will be joining the fun – and as we are all sharig accommodation, fun it will be! Visitors from the Uk, Germany and Austria would be very welcome!

April – is going to be our big renovation month. John has lots of plans for updating and remodelling in the hotel and will be on the lookout for some willing volunteers! So if anyone is interested in some late season skiing or some early season biking/walking (depending on the weather, either or maybe even both could be possible!) we would be happy to offer free board and lodgings in return for a 50:50 work:play split. Get in touch if you are interested!

May 1st – biking season opens (again weather dependent, but this is the date to aim for!)

May 4th – 6th BMAD Festival – thanks to a kind invitation from some of last year’s guests, Jane will be at this event tempting some of our south western bikers to visit another beautiful place this summer!

June 5th – Queen’s Jubilee Bank Holiday – an extra day off work (for many) which gives you a great reason for extending your early summer getaway on the bike!

June 16th to 23rd – we welcome the Oxford branch of the BMW Club for the week. Friday June 22nd will be the first of our summer concerts featuring the Malta Village Band – always a great night! Watch out for other dates during the summer too – and on Band Night, we always do a barbecue!!

June 22nd to 25th – San Daniele Proscuitto Festival – a great excuse for a good day out and some great roads to ride on the way! John and I will lead a group there probably on the 24th. Last year it was so hot we had to eat lots of Italian ice cream!

June 29th to July 2nd – Biker Party Weekend including Friday 29th Music Night, Saturday 30th Disco Event Live Online and July 1st Bike Blessing on the Kölnbrein Dam – not to be missed. Contact us for special all-in event prices!

September 4th to 10th – European Bike Week (otherwise known as Harley Week). Europe’s biggest bike event and a real spectacle! This year we are putting on a minibus for our guests to go to the evening entertainment – and hopefully we will get to tag along too! Places for that week are booking up fast, so contact us soon if you want to join in the fun!

October 28th – biking season ends, our bike gets put away for its winter rest and we start packing up the car for Motorcyclelive 2012!

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!

Back to the show, if only for a short while, attendance figures were up on last year.  The Gasthof  Hochalmspitze stand was, if anything, even busier than the increase in number would suggest.   In fact we ran out of leaflets and bags by the afternoon of the last day.    Bookings were up on this time last year too and we made a number of interesting contacts.    We all agreed though that the best thing was that so many former guests took the trouble to come to our stand to say hello.  Too many, sadly, to list but we all would like to say a great big THANK YOU to all of you.      Ros and I, plus the assorted rabble that form “Team Hochamlspitze”,  get enormous pleasure and satisfaction in the fact that so many people feel part of club Hochalmspitze.

Our place was described thus early last summer and I quote “This is not a hotel, this is a club”.   We are more than happy with that, “hotel” is, we feel, far too impersonal for what we do.    Our “club” really only has one rule, treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.   What else is there?   And the wonderful thing is that 99.99% of those rolling up on our doorstep embrace this concept.   It’s what makes running our place such fun despite the long hours.

Thanks again for all the support at the show and a special thanks to those who gave up their time to help on the stand.  We hope to see some of you out here next summer-the welcoming beers will be waiting!

John

Now I did warn you about not keeping this up! Sorry this is not last night and will be fairly short therefore. But as a small token of my regret I have uploaded all the #motorcyclelive daily videos for you all to watch with awe here.

Yesterday was as busy a weekday as we have ever experienced at any Show – which given that Tuesdays are usually the quietest day, was very encouraging. Again lots of former guests to catch up with, including the second ex TT Champion of the week, Gordon Russell and his ever smiling friend Duncan McD.

Be warned – we have offers we can’t possibly refuse for the next 3 evenings so you may need to follow us on facebook to get the full picture of what we are up to here! But Ill try and keep you all in the loop if I can struggle through the hangovers!

Monday morning – we had quite forgotten what it was like fighting your way up the M42 in the rush hour! Where we live 3 cars in an hour constitutes a busy morning! Luckily a fair few of our fellow motorway travellers turned out to be heading to the NEC too and we have had a surprisingly busy day.

Several familiar faces amongst them too – we still think thats the nicest part of it all, catching up with what everyone has been doing since they stayed with us. And so many take the time and trouble to come back before they leave at the end of the day as well. Today included some who had stayed in 2010 and a group of guys who SHOULD have stayed in 2011 but had to cancel and came to apologise! How nice is that!

What we all noticed today was how many serious enquiries we had – very few of what are euphemistically called ‘tyre kickers’ in the crowd. We guess if you take a day off work to be there, you really are a serious biker! There still seems to be a lot of interest in coming out to take part in European Bike Week in September – so our tentative plan to put on some minibuses to take guests (and hopefully us too!) down to Faak to join in the night time fun, looks like it might be a goer!

Our day was rounded off by a surprise visit to our stand from the legendary Phil Read - an old acquaintance of our friend and colleague Mike Moloney from PeakRider Adventure – who gave us some good tips about winter driving! Wonder what delights await us tomorrow?

Its a bike show – so before we talk about our day, we thought you deserved to see some bikes!

Another day has brought us lots of interesting visitors, but this time many have been from colleagues old and prospective, often looking to build on relationships that already exist via the ever-growing links we maintain online through social networks. The social media side of our marketing and business development has taken on more and more importance over the last 2 years and one of the many benefits – and there really are a lot of them! – is the ability to ‘network’ with many of our colleagues in the motorcycle industry. Its a big old world out there and there is plenty of opportunity to work with, rather than against, or even in spite of, other folk also trying to scrape a living. What we found out last year was that #motorcyclelive is a great opportunity to turn some of these ‘virtual’ partnerships into face to face contact and today was one of those days when we were able to make personal contact with several online followers and friends.

Great to see Carl from StreetbikeUK, for instance, who we met in the real world last year and now keep in regular contact with. Paul from J the B’s came and introduced himself and hopes to come out on a recce visit to our corner of the world in 2012. AJ from Kaapstadtours was another visitor and we look forward to maybe introducing him to Motorbeurs in Utrecht! We also made a new link with TripleJack from Triumphanttours (watch out for a new link on our website) and strengthened our links with our #motorcyclelive neighbours from Tourareus who often pass through our area and now will hopefully stop! Once again we shared the stand with Mike from Peak RiderAdventure who aims to bring not one, but hopefully two, tours to stay with us this summer. This is business networking at its best and something that gives us both great pleasure and a real sense of being part of a community.

In between of course there is a job to be done, and once again we were encouraged by the number of potential guests who visited the stand. It is always a pleasure to talk to such passionate tourists and to have the opportunity to introduce so many of them to the prospect of riding our wonderful Carinthian roads! Not to forget that we also caught up with yet more guests from the last 2 years and took the latest in a welcome list of repeat bookings. All in all another good day and we look forward to tomorrow’s press/racing day with great anticipation!

We start off this blog with the firm intention of updating every evening on how the day @motorcyclelive 2011 has gone for us. We really do mean to try! Of course we may find ourselves tempted from the righteous path by friends and colleagues insisting that we spend our evenings otherwise engaged in the noble arts of eating and drinking – anyone offering? – but then we are sure you will forgive us such understandable transgressions. You will, won’t you? Please?

So Day One Saturday November 19th – and a VERY satisfying day it was. It began with an online booking from the Land Down Under (great to hear we will see you again so soon Tony and Jane) and ended wth another from a little closer to home from a man who likes to take risks – like making a booking and forgetting to include his wife! Happily for his health and wellbeing he has since corrected his mistake! In between we took 2 other confirmed bookings at the show and got promises of several more in the next week or so. All in all our best opening day ever!

Our favourite part, though, was undoubtedly the never ending stream of visitors, guests from this summer and the summer before, who came and spent time on the stand. What a pleasure to see you all. First and foremost, of course, the delightful Adrian who has given up a whole weekend to help us sell our wares, bringing the guest’s experience to enhance our great team. Together with Peak Rider Adventure‘s Mike Moloney, also an ex-guest now friend and colleague, he joined us, Jane and little Ros to create what one friend from Austria referred to on Facebook as ‘the Austrian CanCan Team’! And thank heavens for them all, because there have certainly been times today when all 6 of us were busy engaged with explaining the delights of our Carinthian biking paradise to interested listeners!

Thanks to the efforts of Finlay McAllan and the Motorcyclelive Team, Day One of the 2011 Show was a highlight of our exhibition experience. Busy, exciting, a real buzz about the place. The sound of Cal Crutchlow’s GP bike wowed the crowd and, based on the number of large bags of merchandise we saw being carried around, the traders had a good day too. Certainly there are some wonderful bargains to be had! Over the next few days we will try and get some footage of some of the main stands and attractions, so you can all get a sense of how wide and varied the stands here are.

Today’s key video – soon to be on Facebook – is of Jane trying out her riding skills at GetOn. We can never give these guys too much coverage – they do an ace job encouraging new riders and we certainly hope 2012 will see Jane back with us in Malta on her own bike rather than as pillion to some willing guest or other!

More tomorrow! Hope to see lots more of you all as the next 8 days go by!