[Guides](/guides/) › Get an email when a full alpine hut has space again

# Get an email when a full alpine hut has space again

Alpine huts fill months ahead. That is the part everyone knows. The part that gets missed is that they also empty again: plans change, weather turns, groups shrink, and beds come back at huts that were sold out in March. The people who get those beds are the ones who happen to look on the right day.

Watching by hand does not work for a hut-to-hut trip. One hut on one date is a page you can check now and then. A week-long route is a dozen booking systems in four languages, and every one of them has to open up on the right night, in the right order, or the trip still does not happen.

## What a watch does

Pick the nights you want in the planner and set a watch on them. When space opens up at those huts, you get an email.

The watch runs on the same daily sync that fills the availability calendars, so it sees a night change from full to bookable within a day of the hut's own booking system showing it.

## It watches the route, not just the beds

This is the part that took the most care to get right, and it is where a hut-by-hut alert would mislead you.

If you watch four nights independently, you get told the trip is on when night one opens up on the 5th and night four opens up on the 31st. Those are both real openings. Nobody can walk that.

So a route watch stores the **shape** of the trip - the stages, and which start dates you would accept - and only tells you when a set of nights fits together as a chain you could actually walk. If you told the planner you would take a different hut for a given night, the watch knows that too, and treats a bed at either as an answer.

There is one deliberate exception. If the planner already stood a different hut in for the one you wanted, that night stays pinned to **your** choice. You have a bed; the only news worth an email is your own hut coming back.

## What it will not do

Being straight about the limits is most of what makes an alert worth having.

- **It cannot watch a hut we cannot see.** Alerts work on huts whose booking system publishes a calendar. Where a hut takes bookings by phone or email there is no calendar to change, so there is nothing to notice, and the option is not offered rather than sold and left unfired.
- **It does not book anything for you.** The email tells you a night is open and links you to the hut's own reservation page. Booking, payment and cancellation stay between you and the hut.
- **It is not instant.** You get at most one email a week. A cancellation that appears and is taken again on the same afternoon will not reach you, and no honest alert built on a daily sync could promise otherwise.
- **It is a best-effort guide.** Availability is read from the huts' own systems and can be out of date or wrong. Confirm with the hut before you rely on it.

## No account, and no list to join

A watch is an email subscription and nothing more. You give an address, confirm it once, and every email has an unsubscribe link. There is no password, no profile and nothing to log into, because the app has no accounts at all and this feature did not justify inventing them.

The address is used to send you the alerts you asked for. It is not a newsletter signup.

## Setting one up

1. Build a route in the planner, or open a single hut. 2. Pick the nights that are full, or choose to watch the whole trip. 3. Enter your email and confirm it once.

Watching a single hut is free this season and stays free. Route watches, which are the ones that solve the chain problem, are part of the paid tier from October.

[Open the planner](/app) and set one on the nights you are waiting for.