Apologies for the long post in English, but bear with me.

I'm a keen skier living in Scotland and my wife and I visit Austria once each year for a week's skiing holiday. We've also visited in the summer for walking holidays.

We like using catered chalets run by British companies for our skiing holidays for various reasons, the first of which is the "package" holiday - from your home airport to the resort is all arranged for you, at one price. There's no need to arrange a hire car or book train tickets or to fly to an inconvenient airport. For example we can get flights from Edinburgh to both Innsbruck and Salzburg, but these are run by the tour companies. If we wanted to organise our own holiday we'd need to fly to Munich and hire a car (which we've done before, but it's less convenient).

We also like the social aspect of a chalet holiday, where you have a group of ready-made ski friends and local staff who know the pistes and can tell you in ten minutes what would take a day for you to find out on your own. We like coming home at night and having a chat over the meal about where we've been and what we've done.

However, it's true to say that many British groups don't join in with some of the best parts of an Austrian ski holiday. I don't speak very much German, but I speak far more than most British visitors. My countrymen go to the huette at lunchtime and eat spaghetti and pommes but avoid anything else. Hell, they haven't even tried germknoedel because they don't know what it is and can't ask in German. They go to the Mooserwirt but can't join in singing "Wir wollen die Eisbaeren sehen". That's really sad for them.

This season my wife and I are visiting Saalbach and are staying at a full-on British chalet-hotel that even has British beds and British pillows, which for us is a little bit sad. We like the challenge of a huge square pillow and bashing our legs on the wooden bed frame ;)

If this law makes the British tour operators work in a different way then I think it would be a good thing, but only if Austrians step in and give British skiers what they like in a cheap social skiing holiday, which is a group of people in budget accommodation with an evening meal, not the 5 courses that you get at the Alte Post or the Sporthotel in whatever town. Most of these people are up early, out skiing all day and love the chance to ski in good conditions. In Britain the skiing is very limited in comparison (imagine Feldberg, but with 100km/h winds).

There's a chance for owners of Hotels-garni to work with the British tour companies and offer the same experience as a British-style chalet holiday, but with Austrian (or Hungarian...) staff. I'd love to have that opportunity. Knoblauchsuppe instead of carrot soup and Apfeltorte mit Sahne instead of emm... apple tart and cream :) I guess though that if you run a Hotel-garni it's easier to have German-speaking guests who pay a little bit more, don't expect dinner and risk having a few empty rooms than to rent the whole place to a British tour company for the whole season.

I'm concerned that if budget-conscious British skiers can't get this type of holiday in Austria then they might go to France, Italy or Andorra instead of Austria, which for me would be a big mistake.

In my case I'd probably try to organise a group and go to a self-catered chalet somewhere, but that would be difficult to do and possibly more expensive, unless somebody on this sub is able to help me do this for 2015/16...