An alpine cheese that took over my car, a Design Hotel that kept drawing me back, and one deeply regrettable sip.
Early in the morning, a few low ribbons of mist still clung to the mountainside. The air on the balcony was cool and fresh, and the valley below lay open beneath a sky still deciding between cloud and blue.
I stayed there for a while, in no hurry to go down for breakfast.
Bad Gastein built its reputation on water. Thermal springs created the spa town, grand hotels turned that reputation into architecture, and a waterfall still crashes through the centre with complete disregard for conventional urban planning.
The water made Bad Gastein.
I preferred the view.
I reached Bad Gastein by driving from Bribir to Venice, flying from Venice to Vienna, taking a train from Vienna Airport to Salzburg and changing there for Bad Gastein.
In other words, I travelled east by air in order to return west by rail.
It would have been an idiotic way to organise a simple weekend. But Bad Gastein was only the beginning of a longer summer holiday through Austria and Slovakia, followed by Vienna and Bratislava. Taking my car through the entire itinerary would have meant too much driving, parking and thinking about where the car needed to go next.
That is not relaxation. It is logistics with scenery.
I was travelling alone, so there was no committee to question the route. I enjoy changing forms of transport, and flying and taking trains felt more like a holiday than spending several days behind the wheel.
By the time I entered my room at the cōmodo, the map had lost the argument.
The room was bright, warm and playfully modern. Wood, colour, vintage furniture and carefully selected details gave it character without turning it into a chalet-themed costume drama. The balcony made the valley part of the room, while the design remained connected to the alpine setting without resorting to carved wooden hearts or checked curtains.
The large sofa in the lobby immediately looked like something I could use in one of the spaces I was designing at home.
I did not steal it.
After the journey, I rested briefly and went to the spa. The pool was slightly colder than ideal, but only until the body accepted that negotiations had ended. The terrace above the valley was the real attraction anyway: fresh mountain air, loungers, silence and a view that made leaving the hotel seem unnecessarily industrious.
My main reason for choosing the cōmodo was its connection with Marriott Bonvoy through Design Hotels.
That category can produce phenomenal hotels. It can also produce expensive rooms where somebody has placed one unusual chair under a bare lightbulb and called the result a philosophy.
The cōmodo belonged firmly in the first category.
I was Marriott Titanium at the time, but Design Hotels do not simply reproduce the standard Marriott package of elite benefits. The hotel could have offered very little beyond recognising the membership.
Instead, I received an upgrade, breakfast and a late checkout.
They did not have to give me the complete package. They chose to.
That distinction matters. There is a difference between receiving something because a programme mechanically requires it and receiving it because a hotel has decided to make the stay better. Here, the benefits came with genuinely warm service, excellent design, strong food and a sense that the staff wanted the hotel to work.
During my first visit to Bad Gastein, I expected nothing. By 2024, I understood the arrangement more clearly: the hotel’s role was to make me satisfied, while mine was to use the experience I had paid for rather than politely avoiding half of it.
This explains why I ate dinner there on both evenings, returned to the spa repeatedly and later converted the late checkout into one final swimming session.
Anything less would have been financially irresponsible.
The first dinner began with a clear broth and a cheese dumpling. The main course consisted of two traditional Austrian veal patties in sauce, served under a name I failed to preserve but significantly more elegant than the word meatball would suggest.
Then came a small selection of Austrian cheeses, served with walnuts, grapes and a bowl of fig preserve large enough to dominate both the board and the photograph.
The cheese immediately returned me to my first visit.
I had first visited Bad Gastein in the summer of 2006.
The idea began with an advertisement for Hotel Elisabethpark that I saw in a hotel room in Zagreb. There was no elaborate research process. The image simply attracted me: a traditional Austrian hotel, a spa town, mountains and an opportunity to drive abroad somewhere where I could use German, my primary foreign language.
Elisabethpark looked and felt thoroughly traditional. The restaurant, public rooms and spa atmosphere belonged to an older version of Austrian hospitality. The stay felt ceremonial—not because anyone imposed a formal ritual, but because this kind of hotel experience was still new enough to feel like an occasion.
I went for spa treatments and ate in the traditional restaurant. One of the therapists recommended an alm run by her parents, so I went there for lunch.
On the journey home, I bought two large wheels of their alpine cheese and placed them beneath the seat of the car.
The cheese was excellent.
It was also summer.
By the time I reached the Karawanks, the cheese had already taken control of the interior. Unfortunately, the Slovenian–Croatian border was still roughly two hours away.
The border was fully operational in 2006. When I finally reached it, the customs officer leaned towards the open window and asked what had died inside the car.
I explained that nothing had died. I had been driving from Austria with two large wheels of alpine cheese beneath the seat.
He burst out laughing and told me that anyone who had endured that smell all the way from Austria had already suffered enough. He waved me through without inspecting anything.
The cheese was worth it.
The car may have disagreed.
Almost two decades later, the cheese at the cōmodo arrived at the correct temperature, carefully arranged and safely separated from all upholstery.
That is what progress looks like.
The next morning began with the balcony, the mist and the fresh air.
I had not arrived with an ambitious mountain programme. The evening before, I had looked through the brochures in the room and concluded that Stubnerkogel was the only entirely sensible excursion accessible on foot without a car.
More importantly, it had a cable car.
I enjoy mountains. I see no moral superiority in climbing every metre of one when Austria has already installed machinery.
The walk from the hotel was pleasant. Bad Gastein is steep, but this was not a Himalayan expedition, regardless of my 127 kilograms. For the sharpest difference in elevation in the centre, there is even a lift inside the municipal parking garage.
The town was built vertically and later provided technical assistance.
The cable car lifted me above the valley, gradually reducing the hotels, railway and roads below into something more orderly than they ever appeared from the ground.
At the top, the suspension bridge immediately took control of the visit.
I crossed it without fear.
There was no personal struggle, no shaking hand gripping the cable and no spiritual victory halfway across. It was a bridge with an excellent view, and I walked over it.
The cows were more theatrical.
They seemed remarkably prepared for photography. Some animals tolerate tourists. These behaved like professionals who understood that the mountains had already provided the lighting and background and that their only task was to stand correctly.
Between the bridge, panoramas and cattle, Stubnerkogel provided exactly what I needed: a genuinely alpine day before the more hotel-centred stages of the holiday in Vienna and Bratislava.
The route back to the hotel naturally took me through the centre and onto the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Promenade. I did not need to organise a separate sightseeing itinerary. Bad Gastein had placed most of its drama directly in the way.
The waterfall dominates the town.
It does not decorate Bad Gastein. It interrupts it.
Buildings cling to both sides of the gorge while the water crashes between them with complete indifference to the hotels, cafés, churches and roads built around it. The enormous Grand Hotel de l’Europe rises above the centre, while the historic buildings around Straubingerplatz gather directly beside the waterfall.
Other towns might place a fountain in their centre. Bad Gastein lets a river fall through it.
This combination of spa atmosphere and aggressive geography was what had attracted me during my first visit. The architecture could occasionally feel theatrical, but the waterfall prevented the town from becoming a stage set. It was too loud and too physical.
I also passed Hotel Elisabethpark again.
I remained outside longer than expected, trying to connect the hotel in front of me with the version I remembered from 2006.
The building may actually have looked better.
I had acquired a salt-and-pepper beard and different standards.
I felt no desire to enter. A café in front advertising pizza and hamburgers was not a crime against Austria, but it punctured my preserved image of a ceremonial spa hotel rather efficiently. The entire impression now felt cheaper than it had before.
That may sound snobbish.
It probably is.
Nothing had necessarily gone wrong with the hotel. It had simply stopped representing anything I wanted.
The cōmodo suited the Bad Gastein I now preferred.
It was distinctly modern, but its materials, spa identity and alpine details kept it connected to the location. It worked as a contrast to the old town rather than an imitation of it.
Beneath the Straubinger Grand Hotel, near the Elisabeth Spring, I found a fountain dispensing the thermal water on which Bad Gastein had built much of its reputation.
The spring alone produces around two and a half million litres of naturally hot, radon-bearing thermal water every day.
Naturally, I tasted it.
It tasted like rust mixed with oral rehydration salts: warm, flat, faintly salty and so comprehensively revolting that it seemed designed to make a second sip impossible.
It had the unmistakable flavour of something that must be healthy because nobody would drink it voluntarily for pleasure.
More specifically, it tasted capable of cleaning me out from both ends.
For a moment, the route back to the hotel and the availability of public toilets became considerably more interesting subjects than spa history.
The water contains radon, a naturally occurring radioactive gas with no colour, smell or taste. The radioactivity was therefore not responsible for what happened in my mouth. That achievement belonged to the temperature and dissolved minerals.
Gastein’s medically supervised radon baths, steam treatments and therapeutic programmes have shown some evidence of short-term relief from pain and stiffness in people with musculoskeletal conditions. None of that proves that one tourist swallowing a cup at a public fountain receives any benefit whatsoever.
The radioactivity of my mouthful was also much less dramatic than the word radioactive suggests. Even a generous sip would have delivered far less radiation than an ordinary X-ray taken to examine a broken leg.
It was radioactive enough to make the story interesting, but not radioactive enough to excuse the taste.
It merely tasted extremely healthy.
I did not take a second sip.
After the mountain and the thermal experiment, I stopped at Café Schuh on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Promenade.
I wanted something recognisably Austrian, so I ordered Powidltascherl and a Melange.
The pastry parcels arrived filled with plum jam, covered in crumbs and entirely more convincing than the thermal water. They functioned as a late snack, a light lunch and an immediate correction to the taste left in my mouth.
From Café Schuh, I continued along the promenade back to the hotel.
The remainder of the day was intentionally unproductive.
I had walked to Stubnerkogel, crossed the bridge, photographed cooperative cows, returned through the centre, inspected my former hotel and drunk warm radioactive water that tasted like treatment for dehydration administered through a rusty pipe.
There was no need to invent another attraction simply to appear industrious.
Besides, the cōmodo had been paid for.
I returned to the terrace and spa.
The second dinner began with breaded cheese, followed by a mushroom goulash with Roman-style gnocchi and a mousse dessert.
Eating in the same restaurant twice never felt like surrendering to hotel convenience. The cooking was local enough to belong in Austria and modern enough to match the hotel.
Breakfast could have offered more choice, particularly after the ambition of the dinners, but the products were local and of high quality. A larger buffet might merely have created more decisions before coffee.
Two days were exactly enough.
On the final morning, I used the late checkout for another spa visit. This was not a farewell ritual or an emotional final immersion in the hotel’s atmosphere.
I still had access to the spa.
Therefore, I went to the spa.
Afterwards, I packed, took a taxi to the station and continued to Vienna. Bad Gastein had performed its role perfectly: an alpine and restorative opening before the urban stages of the holiday.
There was no sentimental final walk around the building. No hand pressed against the train window. No internal monologue about leaving part of myself behind.
The hotel had done its job exceptionally well.
I had done mine by using it thoroughly.
I returned at Easter 2026, this time bringing my mother for a short, relaxing weekend.
I had liked the cōmodo enough to choose it again and enough to bring someone with me. With the novelty gone, the hotel had to stand on more than the surprise of the view and the generosity of the first welcome.
It did.
The design still worked, the service remained warm and the combination of a modern hotel, a spa atmosphere and the Bad Gastein landscape still felt exactly right. When she stepped onto the balcony and stopped talking for a moment, I knew the hotel had not worked only because I had wanted it to.
In 2006, I took home the cheese.
In 2024, I left the water where it was.
In 2026, I returned for the hotel.
The water made Bad Gastein.
I still preferred the view.
