Munich Airport to Kitzbühel

You drop into the back seat at Terminal 1 or 2, and within minutes the airport is behind you and the road is pointing south, toward the Kitzbühel Alps where the most famous ski town in the world sits under the Hahnenkamm. The run from Munich Airport to Kitzbühel is about 140km and 1h 50min door to door, from around EUR 190 for a car - and it ends in the medieval old town, at your hotel or chalet door, not at a station down in the valley.

Munich Airport sits northeast of the city, so the drive starts by skirting Munich on the ring, then heads south on the A8 to the Inntal triangle near Rosenheim, where the A93 branches off down the Inn valley toward the mountains. You cross into Austria at Kufstein, under its cliff-top fortress, and join the A12 Inntalautobahn as far as Wörgl. There the road leaves the motorway for the B170 Brixentalstrasse, climbing gently up the Brixental past Hopfgarten, Brixen im Thale and Kirchberg - resort villages that share Kitzbühel's lift network - before the last few minutes into Kitzbühel itself.

Kitzbühel is Austria's grande dame of ski towns: a walled medieval centre of painted façades and cobbles, glamorous shops and long-established hotels, wrapped around one of the best-rated ski areas in the Alps. KitzSki links Kitzbühel, Kirchberg, Jochberg and Pass Thurn into more than 230km of connected pistes, and each January the town hosts the Hahnenkamm races - the Streif downhill is the most feared and most watched race on the World Cup calendar, and its weekend fills every bed and every road for miles. The town sits lower than the glacier resorts, around 800m, so it leans hard on snowmaking early and late in the season, but the skiing runs reliably from December into April.

One practical note. This is a cross-border run, from Germany into Austria at Kufstein, but an easy one: both countries are in the Schengen Area, so there is no routine passport control, and both are in the EU customs union, so nothing is checked at the line - carry a passport or ID card in case of a spot-check and that is the extent of it. The A12 needs an Austrian motorway vignette, which most carriers fold into the fare; the German A8 and A93 carry no car toll. In deep winter the Brixental road and the Wörgl exit slow behind snow clearing and resort traffic, most of all on the Hahnenkamm weekend - your driver knows the timing and plans the pickup around it.

If you are still weighing which airport to fly into, our guide to reaching Austria's best ski resorts from Munich Airport lays the Tyrol options out side by side.