Neustift im Stubaital
Welcome to the Mountain Suite
Champagne? the woman at the front desk offered us. We had just walked in to the Activehotel Berkönig in Neustift, a small town forty minutes south of Innsbruck, where the manager of the hotel notified us that we’d been upgraded to the hotel’s penthouse suite. This is off to a nice start, I thought to myself. The hotel room we walked into was bigger than most apartments I’ve rented: two patios, a bathroom that’s bigger than my bedroom back home, and sweeping mountain views in every direction. There have been a handful of moments in my life when I’ve felt out of place in the best possible way: like how Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) felt walking into the Grand Ballroom of the Titanic. This was another one of those moments, and I was keenly aware of it. I think this will do, we laughed, and we started settling into our home for the next five nights.
Now, coming from America, when I think of hotel food, I generally think of instant pancake batter sitting in half-empty (or are they half-full?) styrofoam cups next to a waffle iron that is long overdue for a cleaning. But, that’s America. And this, my friends, is Austria, where you should always pay for the full board option if it’s available in your hotel. At the hotels we’ve stayed at in Austria, the full board option has generally meant a full breakfast spread, an afternoon happy hour of sorts, and a 5-6 course dinner that’s been awesome. Where I think of food at hotels in America as often being either a neglected, obligatory offering of the hotel or an over-priced, underwhelming experience, the food at our hotels in Austria seemed to be a point of pride: robust spreads of local, organic options for every meal; espresso and mimosa bars; freshly baked breads and pastries. We felt spoiled.
Imagine waking up, rolling down the stairs to your table, and having someone immediately come by to bring you your morning coffee and tee up a multi-course breakfast. Then, you head out for the day to go hiking or biking or rock climbing, and you roll back into the hotel in time for a cappuccino or an apertivo and a late lunch. You shower, you nap or sit out on your patio for thirty minutes, and then you walk back down to your table to kick off a five-course dinner with your favorite person.
Eat, drink, play, eat, shower, nap, eat, drink, sleep. Can’t recommend it enough.
Speaking German seems like it could have been a real advantage, here.
A Textile-Free Zone
Thing one that the Austrian hotels seem to compete on is how robust and impressive their full board offering (inclusive dining experiences) can be. Thing two that Austrian hotels seem to compete on is their Wellness offering. In the case of the Activehotel Berkönig, the hotel has dedicated two thousand square meters (that’s more than 20,000 square feet!) to their Wellness area. They have an outdoor infinity pool, an indoor pool, an organic hay sauna, a Finnish sauna, an infrared sauna, a steam room, a snuggle room, water beds, masseuses, aestheticians, foot baths, and a whole list of things that we didn’t understand. Like the sign that read, As a friendly reminder, this is a textile-free zone.
What the f*$# does that mean? I wondered, during our initial tour of the Wellness area.
The next afternoon, after we hiked up fifteen hundred meters (not fifteen hundred feet) to a via ferrata route near our hotel, we figured it was as good a time as any to explore the hotel’s Wellness area. So, we showered, changed into our bathing suits, and headed for the spa.
The room we walked into was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Half a dozen chaise lounge chairs lined up outside of a series of doors that looked like the entrances to rooms the size of bank vaults. Each door was neatly labeled with additional information laid out clearly about what was in the room and how best to enjoy the experience behind the door, with one slight limitation for us: all of the writing was in German.
We couldn’t see anyone in any of the rooms, and there was no one waiting in the lounge area we were standing in. No one to take cues from or to ask questions.
Spa roulette? I said.
We found a glass door labeled Dampfbad, and I got excited.
I know what this is, I said to Natalie. Let’s start here.
When we walked through the glass door of the dampfbad, we were immediately enveloped in a thick, warm eucalyptus steam. We quickly closed the door and found a couple of seats on one of the room’s built-in tile benches. We had the place to ourselves. We found two cold water hoses built into the wall and we started splashing cold water on our feet and hands as we melted into the benches in the steam room. After a few minutes, a woman in her sixties walked into the room: completely naked. Without saying a word to us, she took one of the hoses off the wall, sprayed down one of the tile benches, and proceeded to lay down on the bench. She’d clearly done this before.
…this is a textile free zone, I thought to myself. We were wearing our bathing suits, sitting on towels. This woman definitely knew what she was doing. We did not. Natalie and I looked at each other and without saying a word both knew what the other person was thinking: we need to get out of here. And so, we popped off our benches, left the steam room, and walked into the lounge area as non-chalantly as possible.
I think we were supposed to be naked in there, Natalie said.
Yeah, I said, I guess that’s what they mean by “textile-free zone.”
We’re from America. The only time we’ve been in steam rooms is in the same-gendered locker rooms of athletic clubs. We’ve never been in coed saunas or steam rooms, and definitely not nude ones. We took a moment to appreciate the situation we were in, we laughed at our American prudishness. And then, we rallied.
We just need to get back in the game, I said to Natalie, When in Rome.
I stripped off my bathing suit in the lounge area, threw it up on one of the hooks, and proudly walked into another one of the saunas butt-naked. Natalie followed in behind me, and again, we were in the room alone.
After a few minutes, Natalie said, It’s not actually that warm in here. She was right. Compared to the steam room we were just in, I felt like I needed a robe in this room to be warm enough.
Let’s pop into one of the other saunas, I said, suddenly feeling more than willing to parade through the Wellness area naked. When in Rome, I thought.
We found a Finnish sauna with a particularly novel feature: one of the walls was a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out to the mountains. The sauna had the same Textile-Free Zone sign on it as the other doors in the Wellness area. A nude sauna with a floor to ceiling window? I thought, Interesting. When in Rome…
As Natalie and I were standing outside the sauna door, a woman in her forties walked by us completely naked. She didn’t bat an eye at either of us. Okay, so this really is a textile-free zone, I thought, it wasn’t just that that older woman didn’t give an F…
We hung up our towels outside the sauna, and we hopped into the Finnish sauna completely naked. Bare assed on warm cedar planks, staring out into the clouds as they rolled over the mountains and trees all through the valley. Well, if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is… and then, the naked woman in her forties is standing at the door of the Finnish sauna. Except, she’s not naked, now. She’s wrapped in a towel, and she’s staring at us, grimacing and looking disgusted, as if we’re clearly doing something wrong. She opens the door to the sauna, points to our towels, and says Mit! Mit! And then, she hands our towels to us. Mit! We look at each other, frantically take our towels from the woman, and wrap ourselves up in the sauna. The woman walks off, shaking her head, and we’re left in the sauna, staring at each other, completely dumbfounded.
What the f*$# does “textile-free zone” mean!? I say to Natalie. And as soon as the woman in her forties is out of eyesight, we get out of the sauna, grab our things, and retreat up to our hotel room to Google Austrian Sauna Etiquette.
A Few Tips on Austrian Sauna Etiquette
I probably read seven different articles and blog posts from folks that had relocated to Germany or Austria and had similar experiences to me. I’m going to go ahead and consolidate some of the key takeaways from said articles for you here, so that you can enter your first German or Austrian sauna experience with more knowledge than Natalie and I did. Here’s what you need to know:
The Wellness area generally refers to the pools, the saunas, the relaxation rooms, the whole deal. When you’re in the general wellness area, it’s normal to be in a bathing suit and/or a robe.
Pools: You’ll wear a bathing suit in the swimming pools. Just make sure you shower off before you enter into the pool. Shower off before you enter a sauna or steam room, too.
Steam Rooms: You generally cannot wear a bathing suit into a steam room. You can take a towel into a steam room, though you generally wouldn’t want to. The thought process there being that if you only have one towel and you take it into a steam room, you’ll come out with one very wet towel. Having said that, a steam room is a good place to start for someone easing into the Naked Austrian Sauna Experience (NASE - just made that up). The steam creates a lower visibility environment that makes you feel like you’re a little less… on display.
Saunas: You cannot wear a bathing suit into a sauna. The rationale there is that your bathing suit can carry oils that damage the wood materials of the sauna and ultimately lead to costly repairs for the owner of the sauna. Instead, you’ll generally take two towels into a sauna: one for you to sit on, and one for your feet. The goal being that you’re not sweating directly onto the wood, and that the next person to enter the sauna isn’t sitting in a pool of your sweat. That’s why the woman was looking at us, mortified, during our Finnish sauna debut: she was worried that someone was going to be sitting in our butt sweat later. Classic American move.
Post-Sauna: The go-to move immediately after exiting the sauna is to take a cold shower. Moving between warm and cold helps promote circulation and has loads of health benefits and is a central premise of how most wellness areas are set up. After you’ve showered, throw on your robe and find a cozy place to relax.
From there, the world is your oyster: you can rinse and repeat in any combination of the pools, steam rooms, or saunas. Most people spend 2-3 hours for a full NASE; it’s not a thing to be rushed.
Now, despite the images that are forever burned in my mind from this experience, I have zero photos of our rookie season on the Austrian Spa Tour (probably best for everyone). But, what I do have, are a bunch of photos from our last five days in Neustift before we left for Switzerland:
