Alps routes and hotels

From time to time one of the German magazines publishes a hotel sponsored guide to Austrian and Italian alpine / Dolomite tours. As is common with these things, the websites eventually vanish and the information is lost. I took an opportunity to save this year’s edition, converting it into a pdf and saving it to Dropbox, using nothing more than an app on my iPad.

The guide covers a big area (which should cater for the urgent appeal merchants, who say “Me and my six mates are off to the alps, we need.....” ) with suggested routes provided by each of the hotel owners. Are they all great hotels? Who knows and there are lots of others to chose from. Are they all great routes? Well, they are certainly not bad.



You can also download the routes by putting the tour codes into the Kurviger app or website.



There you go, instant holidays and those all important biker friendly hotels, that everyone wants.


https://www.dropbox.com/s/sf0nknk3w54zh3n/LBT-Broschuere_2020.pdf?dl=0


Now start to think outside the box. These routes cater for Austria and Italy, so bolt them onto Switzerland, too.

https://www.ukgser.com/forums/showt...ce-Michelin-Louis-KurvenKoenig-etc-GPX-routes



Have a look at this thread: https://www.hotel-5doerfer.ch/motorrad/motorradtouren/

Want to go closer to Salzburg and the ‘must do’ Eagles Nest? OK, go hunting for routes yourself. They are out there and on these pages, too. Here’s a sample, scroll down and you get to Salzburg:

https://www.ukgser.com/forums/showthread.php/543702-Bavaria/page2

Yes, you’ll have to do a little bit of work and maybe buy a map but that is partly why you bought an Adventure motorcycle isn’t it? It wasn’t just for the presence, feeling planted, the big metal boxes and the chance to bolt really bright lights on, just to sit in Tesco’s car park listening to blokes talking about tyres? Surely not? Enjoy yourself, whatever it is you decide to do.

Nice one richard, can you make it a sticky ?

Your wish is my command.....

The hotel group has a website at https://www.motorrad-hotel.com/en - many of these hotels are well documented on this site, especially the Enzian in Landeck.

I have stayed with Klaus at the Enzian and Charlie at Weisseespitze. Klaus may be responsible for the restrictions north of Landeck around Stanzach & Berwang as he would often lead rides of hotel guests over these roads. Both of these hotels had demo fleets of BMW bikes you could hire by the day.

It's a great area but in my last 2 visits to the area I have stayed in a different hotel just down the road in Nauders at Hotel Hochland. https://goo.gl/maps/mRoLZzx2xTZtaAEk6 - stayed here on the way back from the UKGSer tour to the Dolomites and went back again. Nice location where Austria borders Italy and Switzerland and the restaurant is better than the other two.

I agree with Wessie about the Enzian hotel. I stayed there once. It was OK in that the shower, bed and Wi-fi were fine, but, due to its position, it didn’t have a whole lot more to recommend it. There again, if your idea of fun is ‘likeminded bikers’ from Hamburg or Rotterdam, fill yer boots. I think the owner knows this, so has tapped into the ‘Biker friendly’ market. There are lots of hotels in the area, as it caters for the skiing fraternity. Take yer pick.

Want something more that is easy and downloadable for the area south and a bit east of Salzburg to add on? Here’s something that will probably do to get you started:





The eagle eyed will have spotted that the blue route 4 takes the lucky rider past Berchtesgaden and the ‘must do’ site. You can also maybe see how it fills in or maybe just reworks the suggestions in post #1 above. That is not unusual as most routes in the alps have to be variations on each other, simply as bloody great blocks of rock fill the spaces in between. My suggestion is always to work out where you plan to stay and then work out the best combination of roads to suit yourself. Will you miss someone’s ‘Must do’, undoubtably yes. But, you’ll undoubtedly will have found your own, too.

For example, you can see that tour 3 in red is 395 km (250 miles) starting and ending in the one suggested ‘biker friendly’ hotel. That is great and you could spend a happy week or more riding all the other routes too. But for some 250 miles in a day in the mountains is too far or maybe they do not have enough time to spend riding all the routes? Or maybe they just fancy staying in a different hotel in a different town or staying in two or more hotels? That is where the imagination bit comes in. Use (or don’t) the suggested routes, created by the magazines in conjunction with the hotel owners. That is no different to asking members of UKGSer to tell you the same stuff. Indeed, a local hotel owner may well know better how to build a good ride out from his hotel than anyone here. Then amend them to suit what YOU want to do, for which you will need a map and some idea how far YOU want to ride in a day or a week or however long it is YOU have available. In short, use the information, adding it to anything you have found yourself (assuming you have looked) and do some work yourself. It really is part of the fun. Yes, you’ll make maybe mistakes and find yourself coming into your hotel in the dark at 10 pm, as you’ve over cooked the distances involved but the next day you’ll be laughing about it and the great ‘adventure’ you had. We once found ourselves in the dark, sleet falling and the temperature plummeting in the Dolomites, with at least 50 more miles to go, in late September. There was a host of reasons we found ourselves there at that moment. But, we lived to tell the tale, which is all that really matters.

Have fun!