Tailor-Made Hiking Trips in the Alps

One week in late June. Seven people. A couple flying into Geneva and coming down to Grenoble by train. A mother-in-law who would much rather walk four hours than seven. No scheduled departure checks every box. That is not a reason to give up on going together.

A tailor-made trip starts exactly there: from your group, your dates and what you actually want out of the week. We put what we know about the Alps to work on your project and find the massif, the route, the accommodation and the pace that hold together. The result may borrow from one of our existing trips, or start from a blank page.

That is a different deal from a scheduled departure, where you fit yourself to a fixed date and a fixed itinerary, alongside other people. Tailor-made works the other way around: it brings the mountains into your reality, whether that means a family with mismatched fitness, a group of friends, a milestone birthday, or simply a week that refuses to line up with anyone’s calendar.

At Altimood, we are two certified nature and mountain guides based in the Champsaur-Valgaudemar, between the Écrins and the Dévoluy. We lead around a dozen open-group departures a year and build the rest of our seasons to order, across the whole alpine arc, from the Vercors to the Dolomites.

If you already have an idea, even a half-formed one, write to us at bonjouraltimood.com obawbhe@nygvzbbq.pbz. And if you are still working out what is possible, this page explains how we build a trip out of your constraints.

Tailor-made, private hire, own group: what changes

Private hire is tailor-made in the strict sense: you book a guide for as long as you want and build the program with them, from the meeting point to the daily schedule to the route itself.

An own group works on the same principle: the trip is designed to order, for a group you put together yourself. The program can borrow from one of our existing trips or start from nothing.

An open group, by contrast, is our public calendar: you join a departure whose program, dates and framework are set in advance, alongside people you may not know.

And if you are still weighing up guided, self-guided, or self-guided with the logistics handled for you, our comparison of the four ways to go opens with a short orientation quiz.

Four pieces of information shape the trip

They have to be read together. The season points to the destination, or the other way around. The number of days dictates the shape of the trip. It is the intersection of the four that narrows the map down to two or three proposals.

Your dates, or your destination

The alpine season shifts with altitude. Below 1,800 m (around 5,900 ft), the window runs from May to October. Between 1,800 and 2,200 m it tightens to mid-June through early October. Passes above 2,500 m hold from mid-July to mid-September, and at the same elevation a north-facing valley keeps its snowfield three to four weeks longer than a south-facing slope.

Then there is staffing: many high mountain huts open in mid-June and close in mid-September. Outside that window, the beds disappear from the route before snow even enters the conversation.

In practice, a week in June sends us to the mid-altitudes of the Hautes-Alpes and the Vercors. The same week in August opens up nearly everything. In September the Dolomites and Piedmont are at their best, with huts closing one after another.

Number of days: point-to-point, center-based, or a mix

Over two or three days, you link two points and sleep somewhere in between. That is a short point-to-point trip, and the question of what you carry settles itself quickly.

Over five to seven days, the road forks. A point-to-point trip moves to a new bed every day, either with your pack or with a bag transfer wherever a road reaches the stage.

A center-based trip keeps the same accommodation from the first night to the last and radiates out day by day: your pack holds nothing but lunch, a thunderstorm day gets swapped for a shorter outing, and anyone who is tired can sit one day out and rejoin the group at dinner.

The mixed setup slips one or two high nights into the middle of a valley-based week: enough to sleep deep in the massif without stringing together five nights in a dormitory.

The group, its size and its real pace

Size matters, but the group’s real pace matters more. The useful question is not what each person believes they can do, but the pace the group can hold five days running without arriving wrecked at the end of every stage.

Our difficulty scale, running from 1 to 5, gives us a shared language for effort, along with the daily elevation ranges to aim for depending on the profile of the hikers. The seven-question quiz lets you place yourself before we even talk.

If fitness levels vary a lot inside the group, tell us. A gentler variant is usually possible, but it has to be planned before we book the nights and lock the route.

The type of overnight

Where you sleep drives the route and the logistics. A hotel or a bed and breakfast requires road access, which points you toward a foothills route or a center-based week. The gîte d’étape is the middle ground, with half board and beds ranging from dormitories to rooms of four. A staffed hut lets you sleep high without carrying all your food. An unstaffed hut buys more solitude but asks you to be self-sufficient, meals included. And the bivouac opens up terrain no building reaches, at the cost of a heavier pack and some specific regulations.

The concrete differences are laid out in our comparison of gîtes and mountain huts, valley by valley.

Two things to keep in mind: bathrooms and privacy vary enormously from one hut to the next, and a trip with private rooms and bag transfer costs appreciably more than a hut-to-hut traverse (the Dolomites excepted).

A tailor-made hiking trip in the Alps, from France to Slovenia

Our ground is the alpine arc, and nothing else: from the Southern Alps to the Dolomites, from the Valais to the Triglav.

Écrins, Champsaur and Valgaudemar

The Valgaudemar is served by a single road that runs up the Séveraisse to the Gioberney, with huts perched on either side. That geography makes it the most varied center-based terrain in the Écrins, with not a single ski lift anywhere: the Olan hut, the Vallonpierre hut and Lac du Lauzon are all day round trips from a valley-floor gîte. The Champsaur, for its part, has the villages and the gîtes, with trails radiating out of every valley.

For a point-to-point trip, the Grand Tour of the Écrins covers 188 km (117 miles) and 11,000 m of ascent, and a three- to five-day section between two valleys reachable by bus (or taxi) is plenty for a short format. Best from mid-June to early October.

Dévoluy

A limestone massif of vertical walls, where the water vanishes underground into a network of shafts. Our French Dolomites traverse adapts well to crossing this quiet massif point-to-point. Over a week, it fills out with day outings from a single base: the Obiou, the Grand Ferrand, the Pic de Bure or the Sentier de la Baronne, each of which we can describe to you one by one.

Walkable from May to October.

Vercors

The Hauts-Plateaux form the largest nature reserve in mainland France: no road enters it, the shelters are unstaffed cabins, and bivouacking is tolerated between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. Hence the isolation of the plateau, and the preparation it demands. Shift one valley over, east toward the Trièves and the Mont Aiguille or west toward La Chapelle-en-Vercors, and you find a road at every stage, which means hotels and gîtes.

The Vercors lends itself to a lot of different formats for a tailor-made week, from spring to fall.

Thabor, Ubaye and Italian Piedmont

In the Thabor, the lakes shed their ice and the meadows flower at the same moment, right through June. It makes a strong opening request if you want a month that few people ask for.

The Ubaye and the upper Maira valley, on the Piedmont side, form the cross-border ground: hamlets roofed in stone slabs, very few walkers, and passes above 2,500 m. Our four-day trek between Italian Piedmont and the Ubaye circles the Brec de Chambeyron, and privatizes easily by swapping the hut night for a comfortable gîte when the group asks for it. It is the most disorienting terrain in the Southern Alps: you change language and cuisine by crossing one pass.

Mont Blanc massif

Between the Southern and Northern Alps runs a long string of French massifs: the Vanoise, the Beaufortin, the Chartreuse, the Bauges, Belledonne. But let us go straight to the traverse everyone has heard of, the Tour du Mont Blanc.

The Tour du Mont Blanc is one of the most calendar-bound routes going: some TMB huts and hotels are fully booked by winter for the following July and August.

A private TMB is set a year ahead, not the spring before. That lead time is exactly what buys the freedom to adjust the stages. A far quieter alternative, and one we are happy to propose: drop over onto the Italian side for a traverse of the Aosta Valley by its Alte Vie.

Dolomites

The hut network here is the densest in Europe and the numbered waymarking leaves no room for doubt, which makes tailor-made unusually flexible: you add or drop a stage without redrawing the whole route. The trails sit between 1,800 and 3,000 m. Val Gardena, Val di Fassa, Cortina and Val Pusteria are the gateways.

Two things to plan for: the huts book up early, and the high ones, on the Alta Via 1 for instance, are reached only by trail or cable car, which rules out bag transfer. Our Dolomites trek gives you a first read on the massif.

Best from mid-June to early October, and count on ten days for a west-to-east traverse.

Austria, Germany (Bavaria), Switzerland

We build these three countries on a tailor-made basis only. The terrain differs sharply from one to the next, but they share something valuable for a point-to-point trip: a public transport network that reaches most trailheads and lets you skip the rental car entirely.

Austria. From Kasern, at the head of the Ahrntal, the Krimmler Tauern (2,633 m) drops you into the Krimmler Achental and on to Krimml, at the foot of 380 m of waterfalls in three drops. This old mule pass, in use since antiquity, makes a two- to three-day crossing between South Tyrol (Italy) and the Salzburg region, with public transport at both ends. Further west, the Höhenwege of the Zillertal and the Stubai make for fine hut-to-hut traverses. In the Kaisergebirge, the landscape stays strikingly green and flowering through the summer, a sharp contrast with the French Southern Alps in August.

Bavaria. The German share of the Alps is a narrow band along the Austrian border. It holds the Allgäu around Oberstdorf, the Berchtesgaden above the Königssee, and the Wetterstein and Karwendel in between. All of them are reachable by train from Munich. A Bavarian trip is also a way to mix walking with the cultural side, starting with Ludwig II’s castles.

Switzerland. Trains and postal buses serve the valley floors of the Valais and the Bernese Oberland right up to the last hamlet. The Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt, some 200 km and eleven passes over fourteen stages, is the emblematic line. It takes well to a custom build and splits neatly in two: every valley it crosses has a station or a postal bus stop. The main constraint is budget: Switzerland matches the Dolomites on the price of a bed.

Across these three destinations, the walking season runs mid-June to late September, with conditions varying a great deal by altitude and route.

That leaves the far eastern end of the arc: Slovenia and the Triglav massif. Another face of the Alps, more compact and more limestone, and equally suited to a custom build.

How far ahead to write to us

Three regimes coexist:

• Dolomites and Tour du Mont Blanc, in July and August: write to us the previous fall. Places go fast, and a project launched in May gets built around the beds that are left, not the ones we would have picked.
• Vercors and Écrins, in high season or on spring weekends: three to four months gives us real latitude on accommodation.
• Off-season: a few weeks is enough, sometimes less if you are flexible on both beds and route (snow up high, rain more often).

If you are flying from the United States, there is a third clock to watch, and it is yours: transatlantic fares are at their best six to nine months out, and this trip is likely taking a serious bite out of your annual vacation. Locking the dates early is what lets us hold the right beds while you hold the right fare.

The second limit is our own calendar. There are two of us, our scheduled dates are set well in advance, and it happens that we are simply not free during your week. When that is the case, we say so immediately and point you to a colleague.

The budget for a tailor-made trip

On a multi-day trip, the price per person covers our guiding fee plus a planning fee, set according to the complexity of the project. On top of that come the trip costs themselves: accommodation, meals and any transfers.

Group size therefore has a direct effect on the price per person. Accommodation, meals and transport multiply with the group, while the guiding fee and part of the planning are tied to the project itself and get divided. At equal route and equal comfort, a larger group pays less per head. A very small group, conversely, spreads the fixed costs across fewer people.

The budget also depends heavily on the format you choose. A hut-to-hut route with few transfers does not cost the same as a traverse with private rooms, half board and bag transfer.

Everything is quoted in euros, and everything on the ground is paid in euros, including in Switzerland where francs and euros coexist awkwardly. Set your budget on the rate you get, not the one you read about six months earlier.

Finally, getting to the start is part of the equation. Most of our routes are reachable by train from Geneva, Lyon, Paris or Milan, which spares you a rental car and, on a traverse, spares you the problem of a car parked at the wrong end. For a loop or a center-based week, the choice of starting point can also simplify the logistics and cut down on transfers.

The projects that come up most

Tailor-made does more than sidestep a calendar. Some trips only exist in this form, because they start from a group, an occasion or a set of constraints that no standard program can absorb.

• A group of experienced hiking friends who know what they want and are looking for a guide to build the route, set the pace and take the logistics off their hands.
• A multi-generation family, with different fitness levels and different appetites, where the program has to be designed around the youngest and the oldest at once.
• A birthday or an occasion worth marking, sometimes with a night out under the sky.
• A bachelor or bachelorette party that would rather have a mountain adventure and an evening around a campfire.
• A team or a company group, where the summit counts for less than what the group goes through together to reach it.

In all of these cases, tailor-made lets us start from the group and what it wants to live through, rather than asking it to fit into a trip that is already on the calendar.

Describing your project

What to send us in that first message, so we can come back to you quickly and precisely:

• your window, and how much give there is around it
• how many people, and their ages
• the pace you want (or the fitness of the least sporty person)
• the kind of accommodation you have in mind
• any specific constraints: a dietary requirement, an arrival by train, someone with a fear of heights

Direct contact works just as well, by email at bonjouraltimood.com obawbhe@nygvzbbq.pbz or by phone at +33 7 69 44 78 66 (a French number, so remember the +33). Alice or Robin answer you themselves, and whoever answers is the one who will be walking in front of you.

Frequently asked questions

Get some ideas before you write

Our range of guided small-group hiking trips is a good starting point for discovering the massifs, the formats and the difficulty levels we know best. Browse them to see what matches what you have in mind, or simply to gather ideas before building your own tailor-made project.

1. 

   France | Southern Alps

   Écrins National Park Traverse

   From $714 – 5 days

   A 5-day guided trek through the wildest part of the French Alps.

   Know more →

2. 

   France | Southern Alps

   Écrins Tour in 9 Days - Comfort

   From $2,384 – 9 days

   The GR54 stripped down to its highest passes, in 8 walking days, with a twin room and a daypack every evening.

   Know more →

3. 

   France | Vercors

   Vercors Tour - 5 Days

   From $724 – 5 days

   A 5-day loop through the largest natural reserve in the Alps, accessible by train.

   Know more →

4. 

   Italy | Dolomites

   Dolomites Trek - Bolzano to Tre Cime

   From $2,072 – 10 days

   A custom itinerary to discover the best of the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage.

   Know more →

5. 

   France | Switzerland | Italy

   Tour du Mont Blanc in 7 Days

   From $1,937 – 7 days

   The iconic trek around Mont Blanc in 7 days through the most scenic trails, from hotel to hotel.

   Know more →

6. 

   Écrins

   Écrins National Park Tour
   Hiking Southern Alps

   From $989 – 6 jours

   6 days of trekking in one of the wildest part of the Alps.

   Know more →

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