The roots of Danube expertise

Water Construction

The shipping company Brandner has a long tradition on the Danube. It all began in 1776 with log transport by raft to Vienna and Budapest. Later, the company shifted to freight and tanker shipping. From the mid-1970s, the family mainly focused on water construction.

Handmade and Innovation

The first ship was built entirely by hand over five years. The then Shipping Company Brothers Brandner expanded quickly. By the mid-1970s the company operated mainly tankers and employed 160 staff – the only private company besides the state-run operation. Faced with the dumping prices of the state company, the three brothers Franz, Ludwig and Josef Brandner were forced in 1976 to sell the entire tanker fleet..

In the following years, they successfully turned to hydraulic engineering, acquired bucket dredgers previously unknown on the Danube, and used them especially in the construction of power plants. In 1982, the family company employed 223 employees.

1986: The multipurpose dredger
“Three Brothers”

The Brandner brothers sold off the majority of the floating equipment and, based on their many years of experience, developed the multipurpose dredger “Three Brothers” – a universal ship with the largest carrying capacity on the entire Danube. The eldest brother, Ludwig Brandner, retired, while Franz and Josef successfully continued the business areas of gravel production, sand, gravel and granite transportation, and hydraulic engineering. The company earned an outstanding reputation as a hydraulic engineering specialist on the Danube, recognized well beyond Austria. In 2012, BRANDNER Wasserbau GmbH was sold.

The new age of shipping

In 1986, the family ventured into passenger shipping. When the state shipping company no longer wanted to operate the Linz–Melk route, the three brothers purchased two Dutch passenger ships. At that time, however, the legal situation only allowed private enterprises to operate on the Austrian Danube to a limited extent.

On September 30, 1995, sisters Barbara and Birgit Brandner bought the MS Austria from a Dutch shipping company. With the ship purchase, they fulfilled a long-held wish to enter passenger shipping. Within a short time, a marketing concept was developed, and the MS Austria was completely modernized inside in a few weeks.

In April 1996, the ship entered service as “The Queen of the Wachau” with a golden crown and served the regular passenger traffic on the Wachau until the end of 2023. In early 2003, the MS austria princess complemented the fleet as the “little sister of the MS Austria.” The operation of passenger shipping, however, was discontinued in January 2024.

From necessity to virtue -
DANUBE SHIP STATIONS

From the challenge of not being able to reach diverse state-owned docks, a new business idea emerged: DonauStationen (Danube Stations). In 1996 Brandner began building their own, visually appealing and technically mature docking facilities. This created a completely new quality of boarding and disembarking stations for passenger shipping—and laid the foundation for a new business field: operating ship docking stations.

By 1999 there were already 10 such high-quality facilities between Linz and Vienna. Together with the State of Lower Austria and the town of Korneuburg, the first Public-Private Partnership on the Danube was formed: Donau Schiffsstationen GmbH.

The advantages of this arrangement are manifold: customers receive well-founded information, the docking requests of the shipping companies are centrally coordinated, reservations are distributed efficiently, and the visually appealing, inviting docking stations consistently offer the highest quality and service. Since 1999, the number of docking stations has been gradually expanded—today Donau Schiffsstationen GmbH operates 36 Danube stations between Linz and Budapest.

In 2013 the two sisters acquired the shares of the State of Lower Austria and the town of Korneuburg and split the company into two independent entities: Donau Schiffsstationen GmbH and BRANDNER Schifffahrt GmbH.

Today Donau Schiffsstationen GmbH is solely owned by Birgit Brandner-Wallner and is run together with her husband Heinrich Wallner with heart and passion for working by the water. DonauStationen looks to the future with confidence—as the next generation of the Brandner-Wallner family is already preparing for future tasks to continue managing the Danube stations with care and foresight, in keeping with the spirit of the preceding generations.