How this directory is built – a progress report

hochseilgaerten.com is still young. So that you know what you can rely on when planning a trip, here is an open look at where it stands.

What is in it

91 climbing parks in Austria and Slovenia, each with its own page, coordinates, map and a link to the operator. Plus region pages for all 16 federal states and regions, everything in German, English and Slovenian.

Locations come from OpenStreetMap, enriched with research on the operators' and tourism boards' websites. Only two sites have no reachable website of their own – they are in the directory anyway, because they exist.

What we are working on

Every climbing park gets a detailed write-up: how many courses, how high, which belay system, from what age or height, and what sets it apart from its neighbours. For that we read the operators' pages – home page, FAQ, price list – and put together what is actually stated there.

That takes time. It is now done: all 91 parks have this text, site by site, region by region, in German, English and Slovenian.

Along the way a good deal came to light that would otherwise have stood unchallenged: seven sites had a dead or wrong website on file, three no longer operate at all, one was filed under the wrong mountain, and one turns out to be a via ferrata area rather than a high ropes course. All of that now stands openly on the pages concerned.

Why some details are missing

In the age and height filter we hide sites for which the operator publishes no limit. That looks like a shortcoming at first, but it is deliberate: we do not want to send a family to a park where the child is then turned away at the desk.

For the same reason we do not convert age into height. A small six-year-old does not meet a 120 cm limit, a tall four-year-old does. More on that in the FAQ.

The same goes for prices. Where we have them, the date we collected them is shown – prices change every season, and the operator's figure is always the binding one.

Where the prices stand

66 of the 91 parks now carry a price, each with a child and an adult rate and the date it was checked. Adults pay between 13 and 54 €, 29 € on average; children between 7 and 37 €, 18 € on average.

For the remaining 25 the price is not missing out of neglect. Some of them have no ticket desk at all and take only groups by arrangement. Others charge per activity rather than per day, and some are not operating at present. For a few, figures circulate only in third-party directories – we do not adopt those, because we cannot check which season they come from.

Opening hours as data

43 of the 91 parks now carry their season: date ranges, operating days and times, shown as a table on every park page and driving an "open today" filter on the overview.

The same rule applies here: no gap gets filled. Where an operator gives the season but not the weekdays, that is what it says, and the park stays out of the filter. Periods that run only by prior arrangement do not count as open. And the data carries the year it applies to – anyone opening this site in a later season gets no results rather than an answer based on an expired calendar.

What comes next

• the missing prices and opening hours, wherever operators publish them
• our own photos wherever we have them

You can help

Is a park missing? Is a detail wrong? Has a site closed or newly opened? The report form takes a minute – and helps everyone searching after you.