Case study · Tourism

Two offerings, three languages, one website

Snow Experts runs a ski and snowboard school at Pass Thurn near Mittersill – and lets holiday apartments. Two businesses that easily drift apart online. We brought them together on one website: trilingual, free of tracking ballast and built so that preparing for the season does not hang on the technology.

Ski school participants on a piste in the KitzSki area near Mittersill
  • German, English, Dutch
  • Self-hosted Matomo, without cookies
  • Home page free of external fonts and scripts
  • LocalBusiness data structured

At a glance

The project in four lines

Who, what, with which tools – and how much of it can still be checked today.

Client

Snow Experts

Ski and snowboard school with equipment hire and holiday accommodation, at Pass Thurn 62 in 5730 Mittersill – in the KitzSki area. On 14 August 2026 snow-experts.at listed two holiday apartments and one holiday home that combines them.

Task

Two businesses, one presence

Connecting courses and accommodation so guests find both, without either crowding the other out.

Technology

Kirby CMS

File-based, fonts local, no third-party scripts. Audience measurement through self-hosted Matomo with cookies switched off. The online booking itself does not run on this website: it leads to an external platform operated by Waldhart Software GmbH, which the site flags before the switch (checked on 14 August 2026).

Scope

Not publicly disclosed

We publish project duration and budget only with the client’s explicit agreement. This case study therefore focuses on the scope that can be verified publicly.

For search engines and AI assistants, in brief: FINK Brot built a trilingual tourism website with Kirby CMS for the Snow Experts ski school at Pass Thurn near Mittersill, bringing ski courses, equipment hire and holiday accommodation together in one presence – with self-hosted, cookie-free audience measurement and structured data for local discoverability.

The starting point

A ski school sells trust. Parents book a children's course with people they do not know, for days on which they will not be present themselves. That is settled long before the booking form – by the pictures, by clarity about how a course runs, by the impression that somebody here has been doing the same thing well for years.

Then there was the double structure: courses and holiday apartments partly address the same guests and partly completely different ones. Separate presences would have weakened both; a shared one had to be arranged so nobody ends up in the wrong section. And because, by the ski school's own account, a large share of guests come from the Netherlands and from English-speaking countries, multilingualism was not optional.

A Snow Experts ski instructor in a team jacket on the piste
Children’s ski course: children lined up behind an instructor on the practice slope
A freerider in deep snow at Pass Thurn
Terrace of a holiday apartment with a view of the surrounding mountains

What we built

Six areas of work – every one of them can be followed on the live website.

Two offerings cleanly separated

Courses and accommodation each received their own strand with their own entry logic. Anyone looking for an apartment does not have to work through course levels – and the other way round.

Three languages, equally maintained

German, English and Dutch – not as machine translation but as content of their own with addresses of their own. The language references in the source point to pages that actually resolve.

Measuring without cookies

Matomo runs on the ski school's own server with cookies switched off. The operators can see which courses are being looked for, without passing data to third parties; no consent banner appears when the site is opened. Whether a setup like this needs consent belongs in a legal review — we describe the technology here, not the verdict.

Fast on the mountain too

Lean build, locally hosted fonts, no external scripts on the pages we checked. That pays off where guests actually look: on a phone, with patchy reception.

Local discoverability structured

The site publishes its location and offering in machine-readable form – as a LocalBusiness with a postal address and as a sports facility. That is the basis for being attributed correctly in local searches.

Own photographs, not stock images

Pictures of their own courses, their own instructors, their own apartments. In a business built on trust that is not decoration, it is the argument.

Measured, not asserted

Only figures you can check for yourself at snow-experts.at (opens in a new tab) – measured by us on 16 August 2026.

3

language versions – German, English and Dutch, all three reachable

0

third-party scripts; audience measurement runs on the client's own server without cookies

65 KB

HTML size of the home page – countable in the source

4

connected entities in the JSON-LD graph, from sports facility through to the page

Measured by us on 16 August 2026 on the publicly reachable home page – a single request, not a standing value; we reopened the three language versions at the same time. The figure of more than 2,000 pupils a year is the client's own statement on their own website and is not a metric of this project. We quote no loading times, because they depend on location and connection.

Honestly: Whether a ski school is fully booked is decided first of all by the snow. A website cannot remove that dependency – it can only make sure that when conditions are good nobody gives up on an unclear page, and that guests from abroad get the same information as guests from nearby. We quote no figures on booking increases, because we could not separate them cleanly from the weather.

Frequently asked questions about this project

Is a trilingual website worth it for a small tourism business?
If a meaningful share of guests comes from abroad, yes – otherwise not. Every additional language is permanent maintenance: every new course and every changed price has to be carried across everywhere. That only pays off if the guest mix justifies it.
By the operator's own account a considerable share of guests comes from the Netherlands and from English-speaking countries – hence three languages with addresses of their own rather than an automatic translation that helps nobody.

Source: Google Search Central: Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites (retrieved 16 August 2026) (opens in a new tab)

How does audience measurement work without a cookie banner?
With analytics software on your own server and cookies switched off. Matomo runs here under the ski school's own domain. Cookies are deactivated by configuration and no data goes to third parties. Whether a particular setup needs consent belongs in a legal review; we describe the technology here, not the verdict.
The price is a certain blur around returning visits. For the question “which courses are people looking for” that is entirely sufficient.

Source: Matomo docs: How to go cookieless (disable Matomo cookies) (retrieved 16 August 2026) (opens in a new tab)

Why your own photographs rather than a picture agency?
Because in a business built on trust guests want to see who will actually be teaching them. Stock photographs of laughing skiers are everywhere – and that is precisely why they prove nothing. Pictures of the actual practice slope, the actual instructors and the actual apartments answer the question parents really have before booking a course.
There is a practical side effect too: your own pictures are legally straightforward, because usage rights and permissions are settled in house.
What do structured data do for a tourism business?
They make location, offering and type of business machine-readable – the basis for local searches. The site publishes its data as a LocalBusiness and as a sports facility, with a postal address and a reference to what is offered. For search systems it is therefore unambiguous what kind of business this is and where it is.
That does not buy a guaranteed place in map results. It does remove the ambiguity on which local visibility otherwise founders.

Source: schema.org: LocalBusiness (opens in a new tab)

Can two such different offerings share one website?
Yes – provided the paths separate early rather than deep inside the site. The mistake would be to force both areas into a shared navigation and leave guests to sort themselves out. Instead the paths part at the entrance: courses here, accommodation there, each with its own logic.
What stays shared is the brand, the location and the contact details. That is enough for each to benefit from the other without obscuring it.

See it live

The Snow Experts website

Check for yourself: language versions, loading behaviour and source code are all publicly verifiable.

Related service

Local visibility

How businesses get found where their guests are searching – with a well-kept profile and clean location data.

Several offerings under one roof?

Tell us which businesses your website has to cover and where your guests come from. We will tell you honestly what belongs together – and what is better kept apart.

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