Tailor-Made Hiking Trips in the Alps
One week at the end of June. Seven people. A couple who land in Geneva and take the train down to Grenoble rather than rent a car. A mother-in-law who is a great deal happier with four hours of walking 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 of the Alps to work on your plan and settle the massif, the route, the accommodation and the pace that hold together. What comes out of it may borrow from one of our existing trips, or be built from a blank page.
That is a different arrangement from a scheduled departure, where you fit yourself around a date and an itinerary decided in advance and share the walking with other participants. Tailor-made works the other way: it brings the mountains into your reality, whether that means a family of mismatched fitness, a group of friends, a milestone birthday, or simply a week that lines up with nobody’s published calendar.
At Altimood, there are two of us, both certified nature and mountain guides, based in the Champsaur-Valgaudemar between the Écrins and the Dévoluy. We lead about 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 an incomplete one, write to us at bonjouraltimood.com . 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 and own group: what changes
- Four pieces of information shape the trip
- A tailor-made hiking trip in the Alps, from France to Slovenia
- How far ahead to write to us
- The budget for a tailor-made trip
- The projects that come up most
- Describing your project
- Frequently asked questions
- Get some 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 want and build the program with them, from the meeting point to the daily schedule to the route itself.
An own group rests on the same principle: the trip is designed to order, for a group you assemble yourself. The program can borrow from one of our existing trips or start from nothing.
An open group is the opposite, and it is our published calendar: you join a departure whose program, dates and framework are set in advance, alongside participants you will not necessarily know.
And if you are still weighing 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 reverse. The number of days decides the shape of the trip. It is where the four intersect that the map narrows to two or three proposals.
Your dates, or your destination
The alpine season shifts by band of altitude. Below 1,800 m 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.
Staffing adds to this: many high huts open in mid-June and close in mid-September. Outside that window the accommodation disappears from the route before snow even enters the discussion.
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.
If you are used to planning around a Rockies or a Gaspésie summer, the calendar will feel familiar in shape but tighter in practice: the Alps run a shorter high-season window, and the constraint is not the snow so much as the date the huts close their doors.
The 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, and the question of what you carry settles itself quickly.
Over five to seven days, a fork appears. A point-to-point trip moves to a new bed each 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 lunch and nothing else, a thunderstorm day gets swapped for a more suitable outing, and anyone who is tired can sit a day out and rejoin the group at dinner.
The mixed setup slips one or two high nights into the middle of a valley 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, from 1 to 5, gives us a shared language for effort, along with the daily elevation gain to aim for depending on the kind of hiker you are. The seven-question quiz lets you place yourself before we have even spoken.
If fitness levels vary a lot within 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.
Two things tend to surprise Canadian hikers, and both work in your favor. The first is that you almost never carry more than a day’s worth: the hut network removes the tent, the stove and the food, which is most of what makes a Rockies traverse heavy. The second is the descent. Alpine days trade distance for elevation, and 1,000 m down on a rocky trail asks more of the knees than the same day did of the lungs. Poles are not optional here.
The type of overnight
Where you sleep drives the route and the logistics. A hotel or a bed and breakfast requires road access, which steers 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. The European staffed hut has no real Canadian equivalent: it is closer to a small inn at 2,200 m than to a backcountry shelter, with a cook, a dinner service and a bed with blankets on it.
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 running 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 no ski lift anywhere in it: the Olan hut, the Vallonpierre hut and Lac du Lauzon are all day round trips from a valley-floor gîte. The Champsaur has the villages and the gîtes, with trails radiating out of every valley.
For a point-to-point, the Grand Tour of the Écrins covers 188 km 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, any of which we can walk you through 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 wide range of formats for a tailor-made week, from spring through fall.
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 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 hikers, 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 a single 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. There is a far quieter alternative that we propose 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, 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) and 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 excellent 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 the hiking 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 hiking 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 real latitude on accommodation.
- Off-season: a few weeks is enough, sometimes less if you are flexible on both accommodation and route (snow up high, rain more often).
Flying from Canada adds a clock of its own. Overnight flights out of Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver put you in Geneva, Paris or Milan by morning, which is the good news, and transatlantic fares are at their best six to nine months out, which is the constraint. Once the flights are booked the dates are effectively locked, so it is worth talking to us before you buy rather than after. Plan on losing the arrival day either way: nobody hikes well straight off an overnight flight.
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 paid in euros on the ground, Switzerland included, where francs and euros coexist awkwardly. The Canadian dollar can move several percentage points against the euro over the months between booking a flight and walking out of a trailhead, so budget on a conservative rate rather than today’s, and check what your card charges on foreign transactions before you leave.
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 milestone 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 or by phone at +33 7 69 44 78 66 (a French number, so remember the +33, and mind the six-hour gap from the East Coast). 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 trip cost more than a scheduled departure?
With two or three of you, yes, clearly: you carry the fixed costs alone, where a scheduled departure spreads them over 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, the scheduled departure will give you a better price, and the group dynamic is part of the trip. Set against the cost of crossing the Atlantic, though, the difference between the two formulas is a smaller share of the total than it first appears.
Can we have our bags transported on a tailor-made trip?
Wherever a road reaches each overnight stop, yes. It works on the Tour du Mont Blanc, on the Tour du Vercors via 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 workaround for mixing the two: alternate a night high and a night in the valley, so you meet your bag every other day. It also answers the suitcase question, since most people flying in are carrying more than a week of hiking gear.
Our group has very mixed ability levels. Is that a problem?
This is the case tailor-made is most useful for. There are two answers: the center-based trip, where each person picks their outing for the day and everyone reconvenes at the same accommodation in the evening, and the route variant, a gentler approach to the same pass or the same hut. Tell us the real spread in your first message. It gets prepared before we book the nights, not on the morning of day one.
What happens if the weather turns during the trip?
On a center-based trip, the day’s outing gets swapped for one with shelter available if conditions deteriorate. On a point-to-point trip, the margin is built in beforehand. For every stage we hold an alternative: a descent to the valley, a bus line, a lower pass. A forecast storm gets handled by starting two hours earlier.
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.
France | Southern AlpsÉcrins National Park Traverse
From 990 $ CA – 5 daysA 5-day guided trek through the wildest part of the French Alps.
Know more →
France | Southern AlpsÉcrins Tour in 9 Days - Comfort
From 3,308 $ CA – 9 daysThe GR54 stripped down to its highest passes, in 8 walking days, with a twin room and a daypack every evening.
Know more →
France | VercorsVercors Tour - 5 Days
From 1,004 $ CA – 5 daysA 5-day loop through the largest natural reserve in the Alps, accessible by train.
Know more →
Italy | DolomitesDolomites Trek - Bolzano to Tre Cime
From 2,875 $ CA – 10 daysA custom itinerary to discover the best of the Dolomites UNESCO World Heritage.
Know more →
France | Switzerland | ItalyTour du Mont Blanc in 7 Days
From 2,687 $ CA – 7 daysThe iconic trek around Mont Blanc in 7 days through the most scenic trails, from hotel to hotel.
Know more →
ÉcrinsÉcrins National Park Tour
Hiking Southern AlpsFrom 1,373 $ CA – 6 jours6 days of trekking in one of the wildest part of the Alps.
Know more →
Keep reading
- Altimood Mountain Guides
- Guided Hikes in the Alps
- Tailor-Made