Tailor-Made Hillwalking Holidays in the Alps
A week at the end of June. Seven of you. One couple who would rather take the train down to Grenoble than hire a car. A mother-in-law who is a great deal happier with four hours on the hill than seven. No scheduled departure is going to tick every box. But that is no reason at all to give up on going together.
A tailor-made holiday starts exactly there: with your group, your dates and what you actually want out of the week. We put what we know of the Alps at the service of your plan, and we find the massif, the route, the accommodation and the pace that work together. What comes out of it might borrow from one of our existing holidays, or be built from nothing at all.
That is a different thing from a scheduled departure, where you fit yourself around a date and an itinerary settled in advance and share the walking with other people. Tailor-made goes the other way: it brings the mountains into your own circumstances, whether that is a family of very mixed ability, a group of friends, a big birthday, or simply a week that suits nobody else’s calendar.
At Altimood, there are two of us, both qualified nature and mountain guides, living in the Champsaur-Valgaudemar between the Écrins and the Dévoluy. We lead a dozen or so open-group departures a year and build the rest of our seasons to order, right along the alpine arc from the Vercors to the Dolomites.
If you already have a notion of what you want, even a vague one, drop us a line at bonjouraltimood.com . And if you are still trying to work out what is even possible, this page explains how we build a holiday out of your constraints.
- Tailor-made, private hire and own group: what changes
- Four pieces of information shape the holiday
- A tailor-made hillwalking holiday in the Alps, from France to Slovenia
- How far ahead to write to us
- The budget for a tailor-made holiday
- The projects that come up most
- Describing your project
- Frequently asked questions
- A few ideas before you write
Tailor-made, private hire and own group: what changes
Private hire is tailor-made in the strict sense: you book a guide for as long as you like and build the programme with them, from the meeting point to the timings to the route itself.
An own group works on the same principle: the trip is designed to order, for a group you gather yourself. The programme can borrow from one of our existing holidays or start from a blank page.
An open group is the opposite, and it is our published calendar: you join a departure whose programme, dates and framework are set in advance, alongside people you will not necessarily know.
And if you are still weighing up guided, independent, or independent with the logistics looked after for you, our comparison of the four ways to go opens with a short orientation quiz.
Four pieces of information shape the holiday
They have to be read together. The season points to the destination, or the other way round. The number of days decides the shape of the trip. It is where the four cross that the map narrows to two or three proposals.
Your dates, or your destination
The alpine season moves with altitude. Below 1,800 m the window runs from May to October. Between 1,800 and 2,200 m it tightens to mid-June until early October. Cols above 2,500 m hold from mid-July to mid-September, and at the same height a north-facing valley keeps its snow patch three to four weeks longer than a southern slope.
Then there is staffing: a great many high huts open in mid-June and close in mid-September. Outside that period the accommodation drops off the route before snow gets a word in.
In practice, a week in June sends us to the middle 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 very best, with huts closing one after the other.
The number of days: point-to-point, centre-based or a mix
Over two or three days you link two points and sleep somewhere along the way. That is a short point-to-point, and the question of what you carry sorts itself out fast.
Over five to seven days, a fork appears. A point-to-point holiday moves on to a new bed every day, either with your rucksack on your back or with a bag transfer wherever a road reaches the stage.
A centre-based holiday keeps the same accommodation from the first night to the last and works outwards day by day: your sack holds your lunch and nothing else, a day of thunder gets swapped for something more suitable, and anyone who is wrecked can sit a day out and rejoin the group that evening.
The mixed version slips one or two nights high into the middle of a valley week: enough to sleep in the heart of the massif without five nights in a row in a dormitory.
The group, its size and its real pace
The number matters, but the group’s real pace matters more. The useful question is not what each person reckons they can do, but the pace the group can hold five days running without finishing every stage in bits.
Our difficulty scale, from 1 to 5, gives us a shared language for effort, along with the daily ascent to aim for depending on the kind of walker you are. The seven-question quiz lets you place yourself before we have even spoken.
If ability varies a lot within the group, tell us. A gentler variant can usually be arranged, but it has to be planned before the nights are booked and the route is fixed.
One thing worth saying, because it comes up in nearly every conversation we have with Irish walkers: if your legs were made in the Reeks, the Wicklows or the Mournes, you already have the two things that matter most, which are rough ground and bad weather. What the Alps add is sustained altitude and days that follow one another. It is not harder walking, it is longer walking, and that is exactly the sort of thing a tailor-made plan can pace properly.
The type of accommodation
Where you sleep governs the route and the logistics both. A hotel or a guesthouse needs road access, which steers you towards a foothills route or a centre-based week. The gîte d’étape is the middle ground, with half board and beds from dormitories to rooms of four. A staffed hut lets you sleep high without carrying all your food. An unstaffed hut gives you more solitude but asks you to be self-sufficient, meals and all. And the bivouac opens up ground no building reaches, at the cost of a heavier sack and a few specific regulations.
The practical differences are laid out in our comparison of gîtes and mountain huts, with addresses valley by valley. If your reference point is a hostel in Glendalough or a night in a bothy, the hut network here will be the pleasant surprise of the week: hot food, a bed, and nothing on your back but lunch.
Two things to hold on to: washing facilities and privacy vary hugely from one hut to the next, and a holiday with private rooms and bag transfer costs noticeably more than a hut-to-hut traverse (the Dolomites excepted).
A tailor-made hillwalking holiday 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 one road only, running up the Séveraisse to the Gioberney, with the huts perched on either side. That geography makes it the most varied centre-based ground in the Écrins, and there is not a ski lift in the whole of it: the Olan hut, the Vallonpierre hut and Lac du Lauzon are all there-and-back days from a valley-floor gîte. The Champsaur has the villages and the gîtes, with paths radiating out of every valley.
For a point-to-point, the Grand Tour of the Écrins runs to 188 km and 11,000 m of ascent, and a three- to five-day section between two valleys served 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 nicely to crossing this quiet massif point-to-point. Over a week it fills out with day walks from a single base: the Obiou, the Grand Ferrand, the Pic de Bure or the Sentier de la Baronne, any of which we will happily talk you through one by one.
Walkable from May to October.
Vercors
The Hauts-Plateaux are the largest nature reserve in mainland France: no road goes in, 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 asks for. Move one valley over, east towards the Trièves and the Mont Aiguille or west towards La Chapelle-en-Vercors, and you find a road at every stage, and with it hotels and gîtes.
The Vercors takes to an enormous range of formats for a tailor-made week, from spring right through to autumn.
Thabor, Ubaye and Italian Piedmont
In the Thabor, the lakes come out from under the ice and the meadows flower at the same moment, right through June. It makes a lovely opening request if you fancy a month that hardly anyone asks for.
The Ubaye and the upper Maira valley, on the Piedmont side, are the cross-border ground: hamlets roofed in stone slabs, very few walkers, and cols above 2,500 m. Our four-day trek between Italian Piedmont and the Ubaye goes round the Brec de Chambeyron, and privatises easily by swapping the hut night for a comfortable gîte when the group wants it. It is the most unfamiliar ground in the Southern Alps: you change language and cooking by crossing one col.
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 full by the 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 leaves the freedom to adjust the stages. There is a far quieter alternative that we suggest gladly: 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 ambiguity whatsoever, which makes tailor-made particularly supple: you add or drop a stage without redrawing the whole line. The paths sit between 1,800 and 3,000 m. Val Gardena, Val di Fassa, Cortina and Val Pusteria are the ways in.
Two things to plan for: the huts book early, and the high ones, on the Alta Via 1 for instance, are reached only on foot or by cable car, so bag transfer is off the table. Our Dolomites trek gives you a first read of the massif.
Worth seeing from mid-June to early October, and allow ten days for a west-to-east traverse.
Austria, Germany (Bavaria) and Switzerland
These three countries we build on a tailor-made basis only. They offer very different ground, with one precious thing in common for a point-to-point: a public transport network that reaches most trailheads and does away with the hire car altogether.
Austria. From Kasern, at the head of the Ahrntal, the Krimmler Tauern (2,633 m) takes you over into the Krimmler Achental and down to Krimml, at the foot of 380 m of waterfalls in three drops. This old mule pass, in use since antiquity, makes a two- or three-day crossing between South Tyrol (Italy) and the Salzburg region, with public transport at either end. Further west, the Höhenwege of the Zillertal and the Stubai make for beautiful hut-to-hut traverses. In the Kaisergebirge the landscape stays remarkably green and full of flowers 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 the Karwendel in between. All of them are reachable by train from Munich. A holiday in Bavaria is also a way of mixing the walking with a 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 cols over fourteen stages, is the emblematic line. It takes well to a tailor-made build and splits neatly in two: every valley it crosses has a station or a postal bus service. The main constraint is budget: Switzerland has nothing to learn from the Dolomites when it comes to the price of a bed.
Across these three destinations the walking season runs from mid-June to the end of 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 every bit as suited to a tailor-made 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 autumn. Places go fast, and a plan started in May gets built around the beds that are left, not the ones we would have chosen.
- Vercors and Écrins, in high season or on spring weekends: three to four months gives real latitude on accommodation.
- Off-season: a few weeks will do, sometimes less if you are flexible on both accommodation and route (snow high up, rain more often).
Coming from Ireland, the flights are the easy part: two hours or so from Dublin to Geneva, Lyon, Milan or Munich, and everything is priced in euros from the moment you land, so there is no rate to watch and no card charges to think about. What is worth pinning down early is the week itself, because June and September, the two months that suit the Alps best, are also the two we get asked for most.
The second limit is our own diary. There are two of us, our scheduled dates are set well in advance, and it does happen that we are simply not free during your week. When that is the case we say so straight away and point you towards a colleague.
The budget for a tailor-made holiday
On a holiday of several days, the price per person covers our guiding fee and a planning fee, worked out according to the complexity of the project. On top of that come the costs of the trip itself: accommodation, meals and any transfers.
The number of participants therefore has a direct effect on the price per person. Accommodation, meals and transport multiply with the group, while the guide’s fee and part of the planning belong to the project itself and get divided. At equal route and equal comfort, a bigger group pays less a head. A very small group, on the other hand, 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.
One small mercy: everything is quoted and paid in euros, in France, Italy and Austria alike. Switzerland is the exception, and not only because of the currency, since it is the one destination on this page where the beds can genuinely change the shape of your budget.
Getting to the start is part of the equation too. Most of our routes are reachable by train from Geneva, Lyon, Paris or Milan, which spares you a hire car and, on a traverse, spares you the problem of a car left at the wrong end. For a circular or centre-based holiday, the choice of starting point can also simplify the logistics and cut the transfers.
The projects that come up most
Tailor-made does more than get around a calendar. Some ideas only exist in this form, because they start with a group, an occasion or a set of constraints that no standard programme can take in.
- A group of walking 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 family across several generations, of different ability and different appetite, where the programme has to be built around the youngest and the oldest at the same time.
- A big birthday or an occasion worth marking, sometimes with a night out under the sky.
- A stag or hen weekend 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, rather than asking it to fit around 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 the give around it
- how many of you, and what ages
- the pace you are after (or the fitness of the least sporty person)
- the sort of accommodation you have in mind
- any particular constraints: a dietary requirement, an arrival by train, someone who suffers from vertigo
Getting in touch directly works just as well, by email at bonjouraltimood.com or by phone on +33 7 69 44 78 66 (a French number, so do not forget 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
Does a tailor-made holiday cost more than a scheduled departure?
With two or three of you, yes, considerably: you carry the fixed costs on your own, where a scheduled departure spreads them across six to twelve participants. The gap closes around eight people and reverses beyond ten, where the own-group rate drops below the open-group rate. If your dates are flexible and there are two of you working to a set budget, a scheduled departure will give you a better price, and the company is part of the holiday.
Can we have our bags moved on a tailor-made holiday?
Wherever a road reaches each overnight stop, yes. It works on the Tour du Mont Blanc, on the Tour du Vercors by way of the villages, and on foothills routes. It does not work on the high huts of the GR54, on the Hauts-Plateaux cabins, or on most Dolomites huts. Our way of mixing the two: alternate a night high with a night in the valley, so you meet your bag every second day.
Our group has very mixed ability. Is that a problem?
This is the case tailor-made is most useful for. There are two answers: the centre-based holiday, where each person picks their own walk for the day and everybody meets up at the same accommodation in the evening, and the route variant, a gentler line to the same col or the same hut. Tell us the real spread in your first message. It gets prepared before the nights are booked, not on the morning of departure.
What happens if the weather turns during the holiday?
On a centre-based holiday, the day’s walk gets swapped for one where shelter is close at hand if conditions go downhill. On a point-to-point, the margin is prepared before you leave. For every stage we hold an alternative: a descent to the valley, a bus route, a lower col. A forecast storm is handled by setting off two hours earlier.
A few ideas before you write
Our range of guided small-group walking holidays is a good place to start if you want a feel for the massifs, the formats and the levels we know best. Have a look through them to see what matches what you have in mind, or simply to gather ideas before building your own tailor-made project.
France | Southern AlpsÉcrins National Park Traverse
From 754 € – 5 daysA 5-day guided trek through the wildest part of the French Alps.
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France | Southern AlpsÉcrins Tour in 9 Days - Comfort
From 2 519 € – 9 daysThe GR54 stripped down to its highest passes, in 8 walking days, with a twin room and a daypack every evening.
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France | VercorsVercors Tour - 5 Days
From 765 € – 5 daysA 5-day loop through the largest natural reserve in the Alps, accessible by train.
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Italy | DolomitesDolomites Trek - Bolzano to Tre Cime
From 2 189 € – 10 daysA custom itinerary to discover the best of the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage.
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France | Switzerland | ItalyTour du Mont Blanc in 7 Days
From 2 047 € – 7 daysThe iconic trek around Mont Blanc in 7 days through the most scenic trails, from hotel to hotel.
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ÉcrinsÉcrins National Park Tour
Hiking Southern AlpsFrom 1 045 € – 6 jours6 days of trekking in one of the wildest part of the Alps.
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Further reading
- Guided Hikes in the Alps
- Tailor-Made