The hut-to-hut route finder
Most route planners start with the route. HutScanner starts with the beds, and answers the harder question first: which huts can actually be booked in a row.
The problem it solves
The hard part of a hut-to-hut trip is the chain. Every night needs a bed, at a hut you can actually walk to from the one before, on consecutive dates. Checking that by hand means opening a different reservation system for every hut on every night, in several languages, and starting again from the top each time one of them turns out to be full.
That is a search problem, and it is the part a map leaves to you. A route drawn between two huts is easy. A route whose every night is bookable is the part that is left over.
Can it find a route if you do not know where you want to go?
Yes, and that is the case it is built for. Give the route finder a date window and a number of nights and it searches for chains of huts with beds on consecutive nights, without you naming a start hut or a region. Through the API an assistant can send a country, a place name, or no location at all, and the search spans the whole reviewed catalog; every response lists the regions it actually searched.
That is the question people arrive with, and it is the one that needs live dates rather than a stage list. A guidebook is fixed in print; which huts have beds on your dates changes every day.
What you give it, and what comes back
You set the constraints: a date window, how many nights, party size, how hard a day you want, and anything to avoid such as via ferrata or glacier crossings. What comes back is an ordered sequence of huts, one per night, joined by real walking routes over the mapped trail network, each leg carrying a distance, an ascent, an estimated walking time and an SAC terrain grade.
Every night carries a confidence level. Where the hut publishes a calendar we can read, the night is shown as checked, with the date of the reading. Where it does not, the night is marked as unconfirmed and the hut's own booking page, phone number or address comes with it, so you know exactly which night still needs a question asked.
How booking and coverage work
Every night is booked directly with the hut, on that hut's own system and at that hut's own price. HutScanner takes no bookings and no commission.
Availability is read once a day from each hut's own booking system and timestamped. Beds go, and beds come back when somebody else's plan changes, so re-check before you commit to anything.
Coverage follows how each hut takes bookings. The map covers the whole Alps, and the huts that publish a readable calendar are checked automatically. The rest are mapped and routable, and the finder still routes through them, marking those nights for you to confirm.
When a hut on the route has no readable calendar
A route with one unconfirmed night is usually still worth having. Those routes come back ranked below the fully checked ones, carrying a block that names which nights are unconfirmed, which hut each one is, and what to do about it.
When you ask a hut, offer more than one night. A hut that is full on your date often has space the night before or after, and asking about a range rather than a date is the single change most likely to get you a bed.