I wanted to wrap up my posts about our time visiting the Dolomites in northern Italy by providing some details that should be helpful for others planning to visit the region. I’ll share where we stayed and details about how we used the cable cars. I’ve also ranked the places that we used as bases which may be beneficial for someone trying to visit the area with less time to spend. Reminder, I made heavy use of Chat GPT in deciding where to stay and what to do in the Dolomites and I’ll say that its recommendations and even its priorities of what to see vs what was more optional were all very good.
We did our trip as a self-drive and rented a car for the duration of our trip. We used it most days and I felt very good knowing that we could go to and depart from trails whenever we felt like it. Driving the twisty mountain roads may not be for everyone but I found it fairly easy to do. The most challenging parts were the one-lane wide segments which we mostly encountered between Marebbe and Castrozza. Rent a small car and take deep breaths.
Lodging
All of our lodging in the Dolomites was booked on Booking.com. I usually use Airbnb or book directly with hotels, but for this trip Booking.com made sense as an aggregator to make for easy browsing. Here are our hotels, in the order that we visited them.
Cortina d’Ampezzo
Hotel Des Alpes
https://www.booking.com/hotel/it/des-alpes-cortina-d-ampezzo.html
San Vigilio di Marebbe
Hotel Lago della Creta
https://www.booking.com/hotel/it/lago-della-creta-provincia-autonoma-di-bolzano-alto-adige.html
San Martino di Castrozza
Grand Hotel des Alpes
https://www.booking.com/hotel/it/g-des-alpes.html
Santa Cristina / Val Gardena
La Grambla
https://www.booking.com/hotel/it/la-grambla-app-saslonch-2.html
The order that we visited was partly based on our starting location, which was Munich, Germany. Also, I was considering the distance of our drive on the last day since we were driving directly from Italy to the airport in Munich. The farthest distance driven between hotels was a little over two hours. The closest was about one and a half.
As I’ve posted before, we spent four nights in each hotel and I really enjoyed that amount of time. It gave us options if the weather didn’t cooperate and was also at a speed where I felt like we could really relax. That said, we were extremely fortunate in that the weather was very much on our side. We mostly only encountered rain or even heavy clouds either later in the evening or on travel days. What that meant is that our top activities in each location happened exactly when we wanted them to, which took the pressure off by day three. Unfortunately, you can’t plan for the weather a year out so you just need to be flexible and hope for the best.
No point in digging in too deep since price and level of comfort are so subjective. Three of the four places we stayed were hotels. One was a studio apartment. Two of the four were in town with easy walks to touristy stuff and cable cars. One of the hotels gave us a suite upgrade which was excellent. I’d recommend three of the four places. The only one that I wouldn’t really recommend is Hotel des Alpes. The hotel staff was great, and the room was modern with a nice shower but it’s right on the highway. Speeding cars and noisy buses spoiled it. It’s also the only one of our stays where we had a room without a view. The hotel is not really in town either which made me feel obligated to eat dinners there. And the dinners were mediocre at best.
At Hotel Lago della Creta, we were also outside of town but on a cute lake with excellent views from the restaurant and from our room. The food here was much, much better than what we experienced in Des Alpes. We also paid for half board here so breakfast and dinner were included. It made the hotel feel more expensive than the others but once you factored in the quality dinners, it was really no more expensive. The room was the smallest and the most dated, but we had a balcony with a great view over the lake.
Hotel Grand des Alpes was amazing. In fairness, we were upgraded to a multi-room suite here with a walk-in closet so… it’s not fair to compare it to the others. But the food here was next level. The roast pork, the venison… chef’s kiss. It was also conveniently located near a cable car and several additional dining options.
La Grambla, our stay here was really more like an Airbnb style stay. Tedious interactions with the property manager to get access and all of that fun. I didn’t appreciate that part but it was nice to be able to cook some meals for ourselves, and not be on someone else’s schedule for breakfast. The location was excellent and made cable car access a breeze.
Base base
Ok, of the four bases… My least favorite hotel happened to be in the location that I would put at the absolute top of my list. Here is my list of bases in order of preference.
- Cortina d’Ampezzo
- Santa Cristina / Val Gardena
- San Martino di Castrozza
- San Vigilio di Marebbe
Cortina d’Ampezzo was #1 and by a large margin. The hikes in that area were incredible. Best scenery for level of effort. Tre Cime, Cinq Torre and then the Tofana – Freccia nel Cielo cable car. It was all beyond incredible. The bar was set so high right out of the gate since this was our first base. The views from Tofana had my jaw on the ground. I wish that we’d spent more time there to take a closer look at the open air museum and visit more of the WWI tunnels. If I could only have one base in Dolomites, I’d definitely choose Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Tip – The most important thing to know ahead of time for our trip was that parking to visit Tre Cime should be done as far in advance as possible. There is a gated entrance to get onto the road heading up to Rifugio Auronzo. You book your visit in 12 hour blocks and in high season they book weeks in advance. Something worth mentioning, if you book a 3am entry, you don’t *have* to be there at 3. You have the option of entering anytime after 3am but you need to be out by 3pm. Also, you can’t leave and re-enter. What happens if you overstay? I dont know, and i dont want to know.
Cable Cars
There are an unbelievable number of cable cars in the Dolomites region. It is truly head spinning. What’s worse (for visitors) is that they’re not in a completely unified system so when you start doing research you’ll probably get confused if you’re a smooth brain like me. Here’s what we learned and what we did.
I wasn’t sure how much we’d be using cable cars. Our plans included a number of hikes and view points that used lifts to start or to connect point to point hikes. Would the lift passes be a good value, or would it be better to buy tickets as needed?
When we started to research prices and options we found the Dolomiti Super Ski website which seems to be the hub for all of the cable cars, chair lifts and gondolas in the region.
https://www.dolomitisuperski.com/en/
One of my early concerns was whether or not we needed to prebook cable cars, but our research said that that wouldn’t be necessary. It did warn me to confirm the operating schedule, though, because not all lifts operate during the summer and the hours of operation are also variable.
The cable car stations were always easy to find on google maps and you could usually find a link to their website to check the operating hours. I’m pretty sure that all of the parking lots for every one we used was paid. The price could be a variable related to how long you stay. But I’d plan for €5-€10. For popular ones like Col Reiser, you’re going to want to get there around the time the lift starts. That said, there was usually a bus or shuttle that you could use to skip the parking all together, but I’m bougie, so I drove myself.
About the cars themselves, some are open air lifts where you just sit and pull the bar down over your lap. Some are wide enough for four people, others are narrow and are for just two. Others are capsules with seats facing each other. They’d probably hold eight average-sized people. And then there are large ones that hold 20 or more people. Those don’t typically have seats but they do come to a complete stop for loading and unloading. It seems that the larger ones were most common for the very high and very steep ascents. There is another kind called a coffin car, but we never encountered those.
From what I was able to glean there were basically four options for purchasing your lift tickets. You could buy single tickets for each lift, a pass that would last for the full summer season, a multi-day pass, or a points card. After some quick math I ruled out the season pass. It was just too expensive for our 16 days. The math might have made it make sense if it had included Val Gardena, but with that exclusion it didn’t. The multi-day passes didn’t make a lot of sense for us either. We were going to be spending 12 nights prior to Val Gardena so we would have needed multiple passes which would have added up. The next option was to buy a points card. The points cards are sold in 1000 point increments and cost €100 each. The nice thing about these cards is that they are transferable and you can use the card for multiple people by just passing it back and swiping it again. (Day passes are per individual, for obvious reasons). The thing that I most appreciated about the points cards was that they would be valid for the whole season. That way we could just get a couple of thousand points and if we needed more, just buy more.
There is a price chart on the dolomiti super ski site which lists the cost (and exclusions) for each lift. After looking for a moment it’s plain to see that the points are just 10x the euro price. €28 lift ride = 280 points. But, all of the lifts have different prices, and sometimes the price to go up is different from the price to come down.
You can also just buy tickets at the lift station per ride. Since you’re not really saving anything with the points card, that’s probably not a bad way to go. The best argument that I can give for the points card over buying ad hoc is that if you already have your points card you can “skip the line” and just go straight to the toll gate. That never really saved us a ton of time, but I did feel like I was “in the loop” by not having to stop. Not having to wait behind confused tourists always feels good 🙂
Cable Cars in Val Gardena
This area is so popular that its lifts are separate from those in the rest of the Dolomites.
“Please note that the Dolomiti Supersummer pass is not accepted on the lifts Ortisei–Furnes, Furnes–Seceda and Fermeda for the ascent to Seceda.”
Beyond that, the points cards are not valid for any of the lifts in Val Gardena.
What we ended up doing was to buy the three-day Val Gardena pass for that area, and then use the points cards everywhere else. I bought two 1,000 point cards before we arrived in Italy. And then we ended up getting two more while we were there. We didn’t quite spend them down to zero but I think that we got pretty close.
The helpful folks at the desks can scan your points card and tell you how much is left since, unfortunately, you can’t see how much is left in the Dolomiti app. Another annoyance was when a card didn’t have enough left on it for your ride, not all toll kiosks seemed able to combine the remainder with the next card. I never felt confident about that. I got it to work on my own once, with help another time… and yet another time was told… “oh, you can’t combine here because we’re on an older machine”. So, ymmv.
What would you do differently?
Knowing what I know now, would I do anything differently? Maybe. One small regret that I have is not spending the night in one of the mountain rifugios. We hiked to many of them. But we never planned to stay the night. We just did day hikes and spent the evenings in our hotels. Staying at a rifugio would have put sunrise and sunset in the mountains within easy reach which would have been cool.
That said, I’m not sure how we would have planned for that. My concern is that it would have then required us to hike in/out on a specific day no matter what the weather did. That would have been a drag. The alternative would have been to try to book them just a day or two out to have a better shot at favorable conditions but we then would have needed a backup plan.
Aside from that I was pretty happy with how things went. A different hotel in Cortina d’Ampezzo, closer to the center of town with more restaurant options, might have been nice. And as much as I liked where our apartment in Santa Cristina was located, syncing up with the property manager to check in and meeting with him in person the next day was a pain in the rear for a four day stay. A hotel would have been easier. Totally minor gripes that barely detracted from the total experience.
If you’re planning to visit, be patient with your research. The area is vast and it’s a network of towns with countless trails. AI can be helpful, but confirm the things it says and get clarity. Even with the assistance it took quite a bit of effort to put together our plan so plan early.
