Top 10 five-day hut-to-hut hikes in Europe, and how the beds actually work

This is the one that starts at a railway station and ends at a bus stop. The night train from Stockholm puts you at Abisko Turiststation, five minutes from the trailhead, and the Nikkaluoktaexpressen collects you at the far end and drives you back to Kiruna's station and airport. You never need a car at either end, or a taxi negotiated in a language you don't have.

STF publishes the 107 km as seven stages (15, 21, 13, 12, 12, 15 and 19 km) and says in the same breath that it can be completed in five days, without saying which stages to merge. The obvious pairs are Tjäktja to Singi, at 24 km, and Singi out to Nikkaluokta at 34 km, or 28 if you take Enoks' boat across Láddjujávri and save six kilometers of the flattest walking on the route.

One pedantic note worth having: the arm from Singi through Kebnekaise to Nikkaluokta is not the Kungsleden proper, which carries on south toward Vakkotavare. STF sells Abisko–Nikkaluokta as a signature trail in its own right.

The Tjäktja pass at 1,150 m is the high point of the whole King's Trail, and the county board keeps a rest shelter at the top of it with room for ten, a stove and firewood. It's an emergency shelter, and the notice says so: you may spend the night there, or burn the wood, only if you have to.

But the rest of that same notice is the clearest statement of the Scandinavian attitude I found anywhere: there is always room in the cabin for anyone needing a roof over their head, which can mean that whoever has been inside a while has to move.

Set your expectations for the cabins themselves, though, because STF makes no promises: they have neither electricity, running water, toilet nor shower. What they have is a warden, bunk rooms, a self-catering kitchen you cook in yourself, an outhouse, and water you fetch. Three of the five (Abiskojaure, Alesjaure and Sälka) have a small store; Tjäktja and Singi don't. No meals are served anywhere until Kebnekaise Fjällstation at the far end, which is a proper mountain station with a restaurant and showers.

And bedding is compulsory: a sleeping bag, travel sheet or duvet cover of your own. The duvet and pillow are there; what covers them is your problem, and STF's own packing list tells you to bring a bottom sheet and pillowcase as well.

The bed guarantee is real but worth reading closely. Pre-booking is cheaper and holds an actual bed until six in the evening. After that, or with no booking at all, you still get a roof, but STF's wording is a place in an unspecified bed, and that includes a mattress on the floor.

Outside the first fifteen kilometers, allemansrätten covers a night or two in a tent almost anywhere; inside Abisko National Park it doesn't, and the only three legal tent sites are at the tourist station, at Nissonjohka and at the Abiskojaure cabins.

Slovak signposts give times rather than distances, and nobody totals this particular five-hut chain — though the regional tourist board does map its core as a day loop, Hrebienok to Zamkovského to Téryho over Priečne sedlo to Zbojnícka and back, at 16.1 km and seven hours. Leg by leg, here is what the board and the huts publish. Three hours and 7.7 km up from the Biela voda bus stop to Chata pri Zelenom plese at 1,551 m.

Over the Sedlo pod Veľkou Svišťovkou to Skalnaté pleso and down to Zamkovského chata, itself about an hour up from Hrebienok. Up the Malá Studená dolina to Téryho chata at 2,015 m, which the board puts at 8.6 km and about three and three-quarter hours from Starý Smokovec. Over Priečne sedlo to Zbojnícka chata, two and a half to three hours, 400 m up and 370 m down.

Then over the Prielom or the Poľský hrebeň to Sliezsky dom, three to three and a half. Five days, five roofs, every meter of it on a marked trail.

The season is the story here, and almost everything written about it is out of date. The current park decree took effect on 15 December 2023 and closes 40 trail sections from 1 November to 31 May, with two more shut on slightly different winter dates. You'll still see 15 June quoted all over the internet; that was the 1999 decree this one repealed, which kept the high trails shut until 14 June.

What matters more is which sections: the closed list is precisely the high links: Sedielko and Priečne sedlo, the Veľká Studená dolina up to the Prielom, the Sedlo pod Veľkou Svišťovkou, the Poľský hrebeň. The valley paths to those same huts stay open all year, Chata pod Rysmi excepted. In February you can visit any of the five. You can't join them up.

Priečne sedlo is the day that decides whether the route is for you. Zbojnícka's own description is that the crossing is a challenge for many experienced hikers because the final sections are climbed with the help of chains, and that it wants dry conditions. Worth saying plainly, because it gets misreported in the other direction: none of this needs a mountain guide. The decree asks you to stay on the marked trail, and that's all.

It's stepping off the trail that's regulated, and that needs a climbing federation card and an online registration with the park.

Booking habits differ hut by hut, and Zbojnícka's are the strictest: email only, no phone reservations, cash on arrival, and the bed held until five in the afternoon. Zamkovského takes a last-minute call and holds until six; Téryho now runs an online system alongside the email address it still advertises; Zelené pleso takes no cards either.

A bed runs from €30 in Zamkovského's tourist room to €49 at Téryho in high summer, with €3.50 of town tax at three of the four huts and €1 on top if you aren't a member of one of the Slovak, Czech or Austrian clubs. Three years of membership halves that: €22 at Zbojnícka for the bed a visitor pays €44 for. Add Zbojnícka's €7 breakfast and €16 dinner and a non-member's night comes to €68, which against Switzerland is close to half price.

There's no law obliging a Slovak hut to take you in. Every one of them publishes what the floor costs instead, which comes to much the same thing: €12 on the dining-room floor at Zbojnícka once every bed is gone, with your own bag and mat; €22 at Zelené pleso for an emergency place in a sleeping bag you brought, breakfast included; €27 to €29 at Téryho, which finds you a mattress, a sleeping bag and a blanket.

That's the fallback, and it's the only one, because the tent has been legislated out of existence.

Slovakia's nature protection act bans camping, pitching a tent and bivouacking in a national park anywhere beyond the built-up area of a village — which is to say everywhere you'd actually want to — and the Tatra decree narrows the exception to a single site in the entire park: Táborisko pod Vysokou in the Bielovodská dolina, on wooden tent platforms, in two fixed windows, and only as part of a multi-day ski-mountaineering or climbing traverse. Getting it wrong costs up to €3,319.39, or up to €300 settled on the spot.

Three of the huts you sleep in here (Zamkovského, Téryho and Zbojnícka) are on the regional tourist board's list of six High Tatra huts still supplied on foot. Porters carry the food up on purpose-built pack frames, a trade — vysokohorské nosičstvo — added to Slovakia's register of intangible cultural heritage in 2018.

The competition loads tell you most of what you need to know about it: 60 kg at the Sherpa Rallye, and 100 kg up to Zamkovského chata at the Nosičská stovka, run in honour of a fellow porter, Juraj Petranský. Zbojnícka asks guests to carry their own trash back down, on the grounds that otherwise a person carries it. Bear that in mind at the bar.

Piero Rossi proposed the Alta Via 1 in 1969, in a slim book of that name; the Provincia di Belluno publishes it now and puts it at about 125 km, 7,300 m of ascent and twelve days from Lago di Braies to Belluno. Five days is the northern half: Braies up to Rifugio Biella, then Fanes, Lagazuoi, Nuvolau and Città di Fiume, with a staffed hut every night and a road at each end.

The figures above for those five days are the province's own per-stage numbers added together, not a published total. Worth saying out loud, because the tidy round figures floating around for half-routes generally come from nobody in particular.

Italy is the country that will actually put a price on your emergency. CAI's 2026 tariff is a set of ceilings its huts may not exceed. It caps a bunk at €30 to €39 across the ordinary hut categories, sets the member rate at €24 to €31.20, and requires at least 20% off half board for members and for members of reciprocal clubs — which makes Italy the one country here where the card in your wallet also cuts the price of dinner.

It prices the posto emergenza too, an emergency place the warden may create in bad weather, sited so it can't block an escape route: €5.60 to €14 depending on the hut's category and your membership, with €11.50 the figure a non-member pays in the two dearest categories.

The catch is that the tariff binds CAI's own huts only. On these five days, Fanes and Lagazuoi are privately run and set their own prices, and Lagazuoi takes a 50% deposit that its own booking page describes as never refundable. The liner is written into CAI's regulation: use a sacco-lenzuolo, and ask the warden for one if you showed up without it.

The section people trip over is the descent off Rifugio Nuvolau toward the Passo Giau, which the province grades EEA. That's its own category for ground fitted with ladders and fixed cables, and its definition names a harness, a ferrata lanyard and a helmet as the gear. If that isn't your day out, the province publishes the answer itself: an official variant via Rifugio Cinque Torri and Rifugio Croda da Lago, described in its own words as comfortable, easy and a little longer.

Both protected areas the five days cross ban the tent. In the Fanes-Sennes-Braies nature park the only exception is an alpine bivouac that is genuinely temporary, exceptional and unforeseen. That definition is designed to exclude anyone who planned it. In the Dolomiti d'Ampezzo park you may not camp with tents or campers and may not light a fire, and the park's own text notes that its wardens are there to record infringements and apply the penalties.

The association that maintains this loop publishes it as a five-day itinerary with a full set of per-stage numbers, which is less common than it should be: 10.5 km and 801 m of ascent up to the gîte at the La Vare alp, 13.5 km and 1,516 m to la Tourche, 12 km to Fenestral, 9.5 km to Rambert, and 11.5 km down to Derborence, 23 h 20 of walking in all.

Those stages sum to 57 km; the association's own headline figure for the Derborence loop is 58. Every night is staffed and indoors, though only one of the four is a Swiss Alpine Club hut: Rambert belongs to the SAC's Diablerets section, la Tourche is privately owned by the St-Maurice section and says outright that SAC hut rules don't apply there, Fenestral belongs to a ski club, and La Vare is a working alpine farm with a buvette where part of the dormitory is straw.

In Switzerland even that much is rarer than you'd expect: of the seven official SwitzerlandMobility hiking routes that run to exactly five stages, not one sleeps in huts the whole way. Most put you in villages.

The whole loop is signed white-red-white, the mountain-hiking grade: sure feet, proper boots, a head for heights, and a different proposition from the yellow valley paths. The two airy passages (the ledge under the Dents de Morcles and the Col des Martinets at 2,612 m) each have an official signed variant around them.

Read the fine print on one of those variants before you take it, though: the Trou-à-l'Ours is narrow enough that the association tells you to carry four or five meters of cord, because for three or four meters the pack has to be hauled through separately from you.

Switzerland is where the money goes. Cabane Rambert's published 2026 half board is CHF 98 for a non-member adult in high season and CHF 80 for an SAC member, plus two francs of local taxes; outside the high season it's CHF 88. The gap isn't the warden's discretion. SAC's regulation sets non-member rates at 140% to 200% of the member rate — a band that governs the bed alone, not the food, which is why a half-board pair sits closer together than the band makes you expect.

It's also the argument for the card in your wallet: the SAC's reciprocity list runs to nineteen associations across thirteen countries, so a Slovenian, Italian, Austrian or British membership buys you the Swiss member price.

SAC has no rule that nobody is turned away, and that's worth knowing before it costs somebody a night. What its regulation says instead is precise. Every SAC hut keeps a shelter room open all year, sometimes a proper room with sleeping places and a stove, sometimes the bare entrance hall, and every hut is a base for the alpine rescue service. A confirmed booking gives you a right to a bed; arrive without one and your right extends only to places nobody has reserved, in order of arrival.

On an August Saturday that is often none. The cancellation rule is fairer than most: free until 18:00 two days ahead, a no-show fee after that, waived if you can document a MeteoSwiss storm warning or a rise in the avalanche danger level for your route on your day — and if you tell the warden by 18:00 the evening before.

And the tent isn't the answer here either, even though Switzerland is usually the country where it might be. Just over half the loop runs inside federal game reserves — the Grand Muveran on the Vaud side, Haut de Cry/Derborence on the Valais side — and the federal ordinance that creates them bans free camping outright and requires dogs on a leash, which overrides the general Swiss tolerance completely.

The association's own wording is that camping is prohibited across the whole Rambert, Derborence, Anzeindaz, Pont de Nant and La Tourche section, and that on the rest of the route there are no restrictions.

Getting there is the easy part. PostBus 331 runs from Sion station to Derborence in about an hour and ten minutes, and Sion is on the main Lausanne–Brig line; if you'd rather start elsewhere, Bex station connects to Pont de Nant in half an hour and Leytron to Ovronnaz in about half an hour. The one trailhead the buses no longer reach is Morcles.

Sixty-five kilometers and 9,200 m of climbing. That's more ascent than any other week on this page, and more than twice the Vanoise's over less distance. Almost every bed is on the far side of a col. The official framing is five to seven days, beginning at whichever of the nine refugis suits your travel and running in whichever direction you like.

The nine wardens sell the crossing as one package, and it's the most packaged hut route I found anywhere in Europe. There's a €40 forfait that comes with a 1:50,000 map and a passport you get stamped at every refuge you pass, and a Central de Reserves with one phone number behind it, open 9:00 to 17:00 from June to September and 9:00 to 14:00 the rest of the year.

None of that makes it a single transaction, though. Each night is still its own reservation with its own deposit, and the deposit for one date and refuge can't be moved to another.

Read the cancellation terms before you book, because they tighten fast: cancel more than fifteen days out and a quarter of the deposit is kept, between seven and fifteen days it's half, and inside seven days it's all of it. The operator's own position is that the crossing with the forfait can only be done with a reservation made in advance.

All of that matters more here than anywhere else on the list because of what the park says. Overnight stays outside the listed refuges, along with camping and bivouacking, are not permitted anywhere in the national park or its peripheral protection zone. There's no booked tent spot beside the hut, and no legal patch of grass 150 m from the door. If a refugi is full, the only fix is a different date.