Hallstatt Good value
Lake fish — reinanke and saibling, grilled whole — and the Austrian standards otherwise. Half the village is restaurants and all of them are full at lunchtime and empty by eight.
Budget travel in Austria
What a visitor's money does in Austria: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Expensive average across 12 guides · 5 is very cheap
Money
Euro (EUR) · 1 EUR = 1.15 USD · 1 EUR = 0.86 GBP
Cards are taken nearly everywhere, though Austria keeps more cash in circulation than its neighbours and the mountain huts want notes.
ATMs
Avoid: Euronet, the machines by the ferry pier
Use: Erste, Raiffeisen, Bank Austria
A village this size has two machines and a great many visitors. The Austrian mountain huts above it want cash.
Getting around
A short ride in Hallstatt: €10–16 across town — pricey
A little under the meter, since the 2021 rules put both on the same tariff.
City by city, cheapest first
Innsbruck Good value
Tyrolean and heavy: käsespätzle, gröstl, speck and dumplings. The Adlers rooftop has the view; the Stiftskeller has the food that Tyroleans actually eat.
Wachau Valley Mid-range
Wine taverns — heuriger — serve cold cuts, spreads and their own Grüner Veltliner and Riesling. Marillenknödel, apricot dumplings, in the weeks after the harvest.
Vienna Mid-range
A proper Viennese coffee house lets you sit for hours over one mélange. Order Wiener schnitzel made from veal if you want the real thing — pork is the cheaper substitute.
Zell am See Mid-range
Salzburg-province cooking: pinzgauer kasnocken, which are cheese dumplings and the local dish; gröstl; and salzburger nockerl, a soufflé the size of a hill, for two people minimum. The lakefront restaurants charge for the view, and the back streets do not.
Mayrhofen Mid-range
Zillertal food: käsespatzle, graukäse — a sour grey cheese that is an acquired taste and a genuinely local one — speck, and zillertaler krapfen. The town has ordinary restaurants and a supermarket, which the purpose-built resorts do not.
Bad Gastein Mid-range
Salzburg-province food: kasnocken, gröstl, bauernschmaus. The town has a strangely good cafe culture for its size, a legacy of the spa years, and the restaurants down in Bad Hofgastein are cheaper for the same cooking.
Kitzbühel Expensive
Tyrolean: kässpatzle, gröstl — fried potato, bacon and onion with an egg on it — kaiserschmarrn shredded pancake, and speck. The town has proper restaurants rather than resort cafeterias, which is the advantage of the place being a town.
Sölden Expensive
Tyrolean and functional. The mountain restaurants are large and modern; the ones worth the detour are the old huts on the Gaislachkogl side. Spätzle, gröstl, speck, kaiserschmarrn. Obergurgl up the valley is calmer and no dearer.
Salzburg Expensive
Salzburger Nockerl, a soufflé the size of a mountain range and made for two. Wiener schnitzel is veal, and anything else has to say so. And the Augustiner Bräustübl is a monastery beer hall where you rinse your own stein and carry it to the tap, which is worth doing once.
St. Anton am Arlberg Expensive
Tyrolean and built for people who have been outside all day: gröstl, kässpatzle, kaiserschmarrn, speck dumplings in broth. The mountain huts here are famous and busy, and the ones a lift away from the main runs are the ones worth finding.
Ischgl Expensive
Tyrolean and priced for a resort with a captive audience. The Idalp restaurants are enormous and functional; the huts on the Swiss side at Alp Trida are better and the view is better with them. Galtür, twenty minutes up the valley, is where an ordinary dinner costs an ordinary amount.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
The guides in Austria
HallstattAustriaA village of a few hundred people on a lake under a salt mountain, and the most photographed view in Austria
ViennaAustriaImperial palaces, coffee houses, and world-class music
SalzburgAustriaMozart, a fortress on a rock, and the Alps starting at the end of the street
KitzbühelAustriaA walled medieval town that happens to have a ski resort attached, and the Hahnenkamm downhill every January, which is the most frightening race in the sport
St. Anton am ArlbergAustriaThe birthplace of the modern ski school, at the centre of the biggest linked area in Austria, with a reputation for hard skiing and harder drinking that it has entirely earned
InnsbruckAustriaA Habsburg city with ski runs above the rooftops and a cable car from the middle of town to the Alps
Wachau ValleyAustriaForty kilometres of terraced Danube between two abbeys, with the best white wine in Austria on the slopes
IschglAustriaA high, snow-sure resort that links across the border into Switzerland for duty-free shopping, and puts on a stadium concert on the mountain twice a season
SöldenAustriaTwo glaciers, the first World Cup race of every season, and a road that climbs to 2,800 metres — the highest paved pass in Austria — above the village
Zell am SeeAustriaA lakeside town with a glacier twenty minutes away, which means you can swim and ski in the same week and the resort does not shut for the summer
MayrhofenAustriaA valley town at the end of the Zillertal with the steepest piste in Austria dropping into it, a music festival on the snow, and a working village underneath all of it
Bad GasteinAustriaA belle époque spa town built in tiers down a gorge with a waterfall through the middle of it, half restored and half magnificently derelict, with radon thermal baths underneath