The first time I came to Stanglwirt, I barely touched a tennis racquet. That trip was a family one, built entirely around the things my children loved: the children’s farm tucked into the hillside above the water world, the wandering cows with bells around their necks, a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse full of chickens to feed and eggs to collect, a waterslide that felt about four hundred feet long by the time you’d ridden it a dozen times. It was a wonderful trip, and I left thinking of Stanglwirt mainly as a place that happens to be extraordinary at entertaining children, whilst their parents quietly enjoy a five-star hotel around them.

This time was different from the moment I booked it. No kids, no family itinerary to build the day around, just me, a tennis bag, and a week reserved at the PBI World Camp. I wanted to know what Stanglwirt looked like when the reason for the trip was entirely mine: to get better at a game I’ve now been playing for more than thirty years.

Getting there was straightforward, and for someone like me who loves flying, a real treat. I flew on one of Lufthansa’s A380 double-decker planes. I managed to secure a seat with extra room on the upper deck, and when flying into Munich, I thought it appropriate to journey there on Germany’s national airline.

Flying directly from the US into Munich is the best choice if you’re coming from North America; no connections through Vienna, no multi-leg train transfer, just a straight shot into Bavaria. A rental car was waiting at the airport, and from there, the trip becomes its own small adventure before you’ve even checked into the hotel.

I’d been looking forward to the drive nearly as much as the tennis. I’m definitely not an enthusiast of motor racing, nor someone who typically enjoys driving. However, the opportunity to drive a German-manufactured car on the Autobahn for the first time with no blanket speed limit was an interesting prospect. Given the automated nature of most vehicles these days and the long straight roads, it felt extremely safe, and the first stretch of the trip sped by, literally!

From Munich, the drive down to Going am Wilden Kaiser takes a little over 90 minutes, and the scenery does most of the work of shifting your mood. The Autobahn narrows into smaller roads, the flat countryside starts folding into hills, and then, almost without announcing itself, you’re surrounded by the jagged limestone wall of the Wilder Kaiser. By the time my GPS said five minutes to arrival, that mountain was already impossible to miss, rising over the road like it had been waiting specifically for me.

Pulling into Stanglwirt is its own quiet novelty. Whilst many resorts tower over the landscape with authority, in this instance, it was the scenery that was captivating my gaze. The property looked exactly as spectacular as I remembered, all warm wood and window walls framed by the peaks behind them.

Part of what made the week feel worth taking seriously was its pedigree. Peter Burwash International (PBI) has been running its tennis program at Stanglwirt since 1978, meaning the camp I signed up for has nearly 5 decades of continuous history. It started life under a different name, the Kneissl Tennis Camp, before evolving over the decades into what’s now PBI’s flagship program on the property. It’s a little humbling to realize you’re stepping onto courts that have been sharpening people’s games since well before you were born.

Owner Balthasar Hauser has spent those same decades quietly expanding the property from a small guesthouse into a resort with more than 170 rooms and 12 tennis courts. The tennis center itself is one of the more improbable pieces of architecture I’ve seen at a hotel: seven outdoor red-clay courts and five indoor carpet courts, all housed under a grass-covered roof engineered to blend into the surrounding pastureland. From a distance, you genuinely cannot tell the buildings are there. Up close, you catch sheep grazing on what is, structurally, the ceiling above the court you’re playing on, a detail that never really stops being fun to notice mid-rally.

Just before my arrival, the resort completed renovations of the outdoor courts, including the full rebuild of four traditional European red clay courts, the addition of three synthetic red clay courts, and two padel courts. While some might decry the replacement of European red clay with synthetic clay, I found it to be a fantastic addition. The courts themselves had a genuine bounce, and on the one morning that we had some light rain, we were able to play on the courts almost immediately. I can imagine that in early spring or late summer, when conditions are not favorable for a traditional European clay court, the synthetic clay will come in handy, extending the season by many months. Whilst on my visit, I did not play at night. However, the new improvements also included lights for evening play, ensuring guests will never suffer from a lack tennis-playing opportunities.

There’s a small, practical wrinkle worth noting if you’re coming from somewhere at sea level: Stanglwirt sits at roughly 750 meters, about 2,475 feet, and the thinner air means the ball gets on you noticeably faster than you’d expect. Nobody warned me about this before my first set, and I spent the first few games explaining away my slow reactions before I realized the altitude was doing some of the work against me. 

A Lesson Worth the Trip

The standout moment of the week, without much competition, was a lesson with Tennis Director Andrea Puca. He has a way of watching you hit for about five minutes and then handing you exactly the one correction that makes everything else click. After 30-plus years of playing, I didn’t expect there to be much left to fix, and yet there I was, absorbing specific, useful feedback I could feel working in real time. The rest of the coaching staff matched that standard: knowledgeable, easy to talk to, and clearly as comfortable teaching total beginners as they are working with someone who’s been playing since before some of the coaches were born.

The camp structure itself makes room for that kind of individualized attention. Mornings bring two hours of group instruction in small groups. After the group session ends, the day doesn’t just default back into free time. There are clinics built around specific themes, like groundstrokes or doubles, as well as midday matches alongside the pros and other campers. If you’d rather work on your own time, there’s a ball machine available by the hour and open practice on the outdoor and indoor courts, so the actual amount of tennis available in a day is closer to unlimited rather than solely the two official camp hours suggest. When I first read about the program, two hours of group lessons a day sounded almost light. It took actually being there to realize the two hours were just the starting point for a day that kept generating tennis all on its own.

A Surprise Discovery: Padel

Tennis was the whole reason I booked the trip, but padel turned out to be the surprise I didn’t see coming. Having played padel myself many times, especially when traveling, I was excited to learn that Stanglwirt had installed two outdoor padel courts alongside their dedicated indoor court. If you haven’t played padel before, it plays faster than tennis and is extremely social. Case in point: I played on two separate occasions with guests who had walked up and needed a fourth, and I offered to join them, which they accepted without hesitation.

Thirty Years In and Still Learning

What’s stayed with me most, though, isn’t a single drill or a single correction from Andrea. It’s the reminder that even after three decades of playing, there’s still real value in serious coaching, and that a week built entirely around tennis, on courts with this much history and this much unlikely charm, is its own kind of vacation, distinct from and just as good as the family trip that came before it. I flew in thinking I already knew my game reasonably well. I flew home with a handful of specific tips to work on and a growing case for coming back to do it all over again.

To learn more about the amazing off-court aspects of my recent visit to Stanglwirt, stay tuned for an additional future blog post on Tennis Resorts Online.