The road up to Gumpenberg is steep and narrow. On one side the Ennstal falls away towards a long limestone wall; on the other there is flowering grass and the roofs of chalets. Most people drive it. The better way up is to let someone else do the driving.
Schladming and Haus im Ennstal are on the main Salzburg–Graz railway, and the house runs a shuttle from the station. You can reach this hillside from Vienna, Salzburg or Munich without a car. For an alpine stay, the journey is almost always the largest part of its footprint, and no hotel eco label anywhere counts it. That decision is yours, and it outweighs anything a hotel can put on its roof.
The greenest part of an alpine holiday is usually the train that got you there.
A meadow protected by law
Step outside and you are in long grass: a path worn through a steep meadow, spruce at the top, limestone across the valley. The municipality lies within a Natura 2000 site, the European conservation designation, which is why this slope is still meadow and forest. The view is protected by law, not by good intentions.
A label you can check
The house holds the Austrian Ecolabel, a state scheme audited by an outside body, for both its rooms and its kitchen. The register is public, and the licence number is 801. We looked it up, as anyone can in about a minute and a half. The label checks practices, from energy and waste to water and food. It does not measure emissions, and like almost every hotel in Europe the house publishes no carbon figure. Read it as a good sign that someone has checked, not as a number.
What you take home
What stays with you is not the hardware. It is a slope left as a slope, a cheese made in the valley, cattle coming down from the pastures in September, and having got here without a car. That is eco travel as Atlántis means it: a lighter footprint that also makes for a better holiday.
What we actually know
- Austrian Ecolabel (Österreichisches Umweltzeichen) licence 801, listed in the environment ministry’s public register under both the accommodation and the gastronomy guidelines.
- The municipality lies within Natura 2000 site AT2204000.
- Stated by the hotel: heating by wood pellets, a 150 kWp solar array, and around 70 per cent of suppliers from Styria. No operational carbon or energy figure is published.
- Ennstaler Steirerkas holds a Protected Designation of Origin granted in 2021.
- Shuttle from Schladming or Haus im Ennstal stations on the Salzburg–Graz line.
- Ramsau am Dachstein Almabtrieb, 25 and 26 September 2026.
Photographs and footage from 30 and 31 August 2026. We did not ask the hotel for comment and received nothing from it.
Independent and self-funded. Atlántis is not sponsored by design: not affiliated, not a paid placement, and nobody we write about knew in advance. The stay was found, booked and paid for at our own cost. The views are our own, judged against the Atlántis values: sustainability, cultural immersion, eco travel, real experiences, family-friendliness, and car-free travel or the deep past, depending on the place. No person appears in any photograph or clip on this page, and every clip is silent.