HutVigil
FAQ
How HutVigil works
Straight answers about where the numbers come from and what happens with your email address.
Where does the data come from?
Two places. Most of the huts here — everything run by the SAC, DAV, ÖAV and AVS clubs across Switzerland, Austria, Germany and South Tyrol — publish their availability through hut-reservation.org, which gives the exact number of free beds for each night. The two Chamonix refuges we follow, the Cosmiques and the Charpoua, sit on a different engine that only says whether a night is open or fully booked. That's why you'll never see bed counts on those two pages.
Do you resell beds or take a commission?
No. HutVigil doesn't take bookings and can't hold a bed for you. When you click Book, you land on the official platform and reserve there at the normal price. We have no deal with any alpine club, and if one of the platforms asked us to stop reading their availability, we'd stop.
How fresh is the availability?
The flagship huts — the stages of the seven routes, plus the houses people ask for most — get checked every 30 minutes. The rest of the ~700 gets a pass every couple of hours. Each page tells you when its data was last refreshed. Keep in mind that anything can happen between two checks: a bed that looks free here can be taken on the official site before you finish typing your name.
What makes the route alert different?
A booking platform can tell you whether one hut has beds on one night. A traverse needs more than that: hut 1 on Monday, hut 2 on Tuesday, hut 3 on Wednesday, all at once. That chain is what HutVigil watches. Pick a route, a window and how many nights in a row you need, and the day a full chain opens you get one email. Stages we can't track are listed in that email too, so you know which ones to book yourself.
Why do some huts show no bed numbers?
Their booking system doesn't publish any. The Chamonix engine, for example, only reports open or full — so those pages use open/full markers instead of numbers, and alerts with a bed threshold are switched off there.
Why is a whole route only "partially" covered?
A few stages book through systems we can't read yet: the Italian CAI rifugios on the Spaghetti Tour, some private valley inns, the Hörnlihütte's own Zermatt system. The route pages don't hide this — those stages are simply marked as untracked. They still appear in the itinerary, they just carry no live data, and you book them directly.
What do you store about me?
An email address and the alerts attached to it. That's the whole database as far as you're concerned. Each alert has to be confirmed from your inbox before it goes live, every email we send has an unsubscribe link that works on the first click, and there is no analytics script anywhere on the site.
Anything else?
The About page goes into more detail on how the project runs. Otherwise, the quickest way to see what HutVigil does is to set an alert on a hut you actually want.