@scott43 I don't know exact practice, but it's in general in Europe that things are a bit (or probably a lot) more slack then in USA. Here you are still responsible yourself for your stupid doings and it's not so easy to sue everyone for everything. So yeah, maybe it's "not much of liability" but I actually like it this way. Now if Austria has it less then Germany or some other country, I honestly don't know. But in this particular case (and few other accidents in ski resorts where it was clearly operators fault), they sort of silently put it under the rug, as skiing is just too important business in Austria, and few dead people can't threaten whole country's economy. I somehow actually understand this, but in such cases it goes way to far, and if consequences of such errors are several dead people, you really need to do something, not just drop everything and say "oh well it is what it is, let's roll on like nothing happened".