You’ve found the hike. You’ve seen the photos. Now you’re stuck on the part nobody posts about: how the trip actually happens. Book a guided tour, book a self-guided hiking tour, or plan the whole thing yourself and keep the money.
I’ve done all three, and I now run a company built entirely on the middle one, so you can see my bias coming from a long way off. Which is exactly why this post includes the bit where I tell you when not to book a self-guided hiking tour with us.
TL;DR
A self-guided hiking tour is a multi-day hike where a tour company plans your route, books your accommodation along it using their local knowledge of the best places to stay, gives you GPS tracks and route notes, and stays reachable while you hike. No guide hikes with you and there is no group. You set the pace and you choose who comes.
What’s included
Accommodation booked in advance, a day-by-day route with GPS tracks, an info pack about 30 days before you go, and the transfers the route needs, which are private on some tours and public transport on others. Plus WhatsApp support throughout your trip and a custom training plan built after you book. Luggage transfer on select tours.
What’s not
A guide, or a group.
Who it suits
Hikers who value their time and want to show up and hike, knowing they’ll be staying in lovely accommodations, without doing the research, contacting the accommodations, looking up bus schedules or tracking down a local taxi in a language they don’t speak.
Who should skip one
Anyone who genuinely enjoys the planning, anyone attempting a route that needs a guide rather than a plan, and anyone on a tight budget. A self-guided hiking tour is good value, but doing everything yourself is cheaper.
What Is a Self-Guided Hiking Tour?
A self-guided hiking tour is a multi-day hike where a tour company plans the route, books your accommodation along it using their local knowledge of the best places to stay, supplies GPS tracks and written route notes, arranges the transfers the route needs, and stays contactable while you’re out there. No guide hikes with you, and there is no group. You hike the route yourself, at your own pace, with your own people.
The word “tour” does a lot of damage here. People hear it and picture a minibus, a laminated schedule and someone holding a small flag above their head so nobody wanders off. A self-guided hiking tour has none of those. It’s far closer to the trip you’d have planned yourself, if you’d had a stack of spare evenings and a comfortable working knowledge of booking mountain huts in a language you might not speak.
The same idea exists outside hiking. A self-guided trip can be cycling, rail or a driving route, and the principle never changes: somebody else handles the logistics, so you’re free to focus on your adventure.
| Part of the trip | On a self-guided hiking tour | What that means on the trail |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation | Included, booked and paid before you leave home | You never phone a mountain hut and you never arrive in a village hoping to find a place to sleep. |
| Route planning | Included | Every day is planned start to finish, including the easier and harder variants where a route has them. |
| GPS tracks and route notes | Included | You navigate yourself, but you’re following a route somebody has actually hiked, not a line on a public map. |
| Info pack | Included, about 30 days before departure | Everything you need to read before you fly, in one place. |
| Support while you’re hiking | Included: WhatsApp support throughout your trip, through our trusted local partners | Trail closed, weather turning, something unexpected? You message a real person who knows the region. |
| Transfers | Included where the route needs them. Private on some tours, public bus on others | No decoding a timetable at a bus stop in the rain. |
| Luggage transfer | On select tours only | Where it’s offered you hike with a daypack. Each tour page says plainly whether it’s included. |
| Custom training plan | Included free with every booking, valued at €300 | Built for your tour, your fitness and your timeline after you book, not a generic “hike more” plan. |
| In-person pre-hike briefing | On select tours | Latest trail conditions and your last-minute questions answered before you start. |
| A guide hiking with you | Not included, by design | This is the whole point. Nobody sets your pace but you. |
| A group of strangers | Not included | You travel with the people you chose and nobody else. |
| Meals | Varies by route | Mountain accommodation often includes dinner and breakfast; in villages you’ll usually choose. Each tour page sets out which meals are covered. |
| Flights | Not included | Booked by you, around the dates your tour runs. |
That table is what a Monkeys and Mountains self-guided hiking tour includes. It varies if you book with another company, so read their inclusions carefully. The custom training plan in particular is ours: most self-guided hiking companies don’t offer one at all.
What a Self-Guided Hiking Tour Is Not
Most disappointment on a trip like this comes from one of five wrong assumptions. Here they are, so yours isn’t one of them.
- It isn’t a guide keeping a discreet distance behind you. There is no guide. Not ahead, not behind, not waiting in a van at the next col. You navigate, using the tracks and notes you’re given.
- It isn’t a shortcut past the training. Every one of our tours needs a degree of fitness, even the easiest one. A self-guided hiking tour takes the logistics off your plate, and the free custom training plan that comes with every booking gets you ready for the climbing.
- It isn’t a day you can improvise from scratch. Your accommodation is booked and waiting each night, so you do need to get from A to B that day. What is completely yours is how you get there: which variant you take, how many photo stops you make, and how long lunch runs.
- It isn’t a group tour. There’s no hiking with a group of strangers, and no annoying one who never stops talking. The only people on your trip are the ones you invited.
- It isn’t the cheapest way to hike a route. Planning it yourself is almost always cheaper in money, but it is more expensive in the time it takes to plan.
Couldn’t You Just Plan a Self-Guided Hike Yourself?
Yes. You genuinely could, and some hikers should. So let’s do this honestly instead of pretending the DIY option doesn’t exist.
Here’s what planning it yourself actually involves on a popular Alpine route. The Tour du Mont Blanc, Alta Via 1 and the Haute Route all need to be booked well in advance, and the accommodations along them open their reservations at different times rather than on one tidy date. So you track them one at a time and hope you’re looking on the right morning.
Then there’s the part nobody warns you about. At a few key points on these routes there are only a handful of places to stay. If they fill up, there is no alternative on that stage, so your route has to change shape around the gap. Knowing which ones to book, and when, is the difference between the route you wanted and the route you ended up with.
Add accommodations, lift timetables and bus schedules to sort out in a language you might not speak, and what you have is a project. When I planned my own Tour du Mont Blanc it took hours and hours to work out the route and book every night of it. That isn’t a marketing line. It’s the actual reason this company exists.
| What you’re comparing | Planning it yourself | Self-guided hiking tour | Guided hiking tour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who books your accommodation | You, one property at a time, in whatever order they open | The tour company | The tour company |
| Hours of your own time | Many evenings spread over several months | About as long as it takes to read a tour page and answer a questionnaire | Roughly the same |
| If a mountain hut or accommodation is full | You find out, then redesign the day around it | Sorted before you ever see it | Sorted before you ever see it |
| Who navigates | You, from maps and apps you sourced yourself | You, from GPS tracks and route notes written for that route | Your guide |
| Your daily pace | Yours | Yours | The group’s |
| Who you hike with | Whoever you invited | Whoever you invited | Whoever else booked that departure |
| If something goes wrong on the trail | You sort it | WhatsApp support throughout your trip, through local partners | Your guide, immediately, in person |
| Cost | Lowest | In the middle | Highest |
| Suits | Experienced hikers who enjoy the planning | Hikers who want independence without the admin | High altitude, remote routes, and hikes that legally require a guide |
When Planning a Hike Yourself Is Genuinely the Better Call
Three situations where you should close this page and go and book it yourself.
- Day hikes. I plan almost every day hike I do myself. It takes twenty minutes, and I get to change my mind at the trailhead.
- Routes with a bed every hour or two. The Camino de Santiago is the obvious one. Most pilgrims I know hiked the whole thing independently and loved it exactly that way. When the next place to stay is rarely more than an hour or two further on, booking ahead stops being protection and starts being a cage.
- You actually like the planning. Some hikers find the research almost as good as the hike. If that’s you, you don’t have a problem to solve, and you should keep your money.
The Real Benefits of a Self-Guided Hiking Tour
Not the brochure benefits. The ones hikers actually tell us about afterwards.
- You get your months back. Instead of months of complicated accommodation admin, it all compresses into one afternoon of reading tour pages. The trip still happens. You just don’t spend your winter on it.
- You hike at your own pace, all day, every day. Quick on the climbs and slow at the top? Fine. Ninety minutes photographing one larch tree? Also fine. Nobody sighs.
- You travel with only your own people. Your partner, your hiking friends, or nobody at all. No eight days beside the one person who has a great deal to say and the entire Alps in which to say it.
- You get the places that are genuinely hard to get. The stages with only a handful of accommodations are the ones that decide whether your route works at all. Those get booked for you, in the right order, at the right time, by people who know which ones are worth staying in.
- Lunch is yours. A two-hour lunch on a terrace is not a scheduling failure. On a self-guided hiking tour it’s a completely legitimate use of a Tuesday. Bring better snacks than you think you need anyway.
- You arrive actually trained for it. Every Monkeys and Mountains booking includes a custom training plan valued at €300, built for your specific tour, your fitness and your timeline. Not “hike more”. A real plan that works if you live somewhere flat and your knees have opinions. As far as we know, no other self-guided hiking company includes one.
And then the part that doesn’t fit in a bullet. I hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc during a genuinely hard stretch of my life. I didn’t need another self-help book, I needed space and some distance from my own head. Somewhere between the climbs, the views and a fair amount of cheese and wine, something shifted, and I came home more like myself than I had been in a while. That’s what people are really booking. The logistics are just the thing standing in front of it.
Not sure you’re fit enough yet?
That’s the most common worry we hear, and it’s the most fixable one. Our free 6-week hiking training plan is built for hikers starting from flat ground, busy weeks and knees that complain on the descent.
Who a Self-Guided Hiking Tour Is Right For, and Who Should Skip One
A self-guided hiking tour is a good fit if:
- You have a reasonable level of fitness, or you’re willing to train for it.
- You want the trip to be yours: your pace, your stops, your people.
- You’re hiking as a couple, with friends, or solo and happy about it.
- It’s your first multi-day hike and you’d rather start on a shorter or gentler route.
- You’ve already tried to book a mountain hut on a popular Alpine route and quietly closed the laptop.
Skip a self-guided hiking tour and book a guide if:
- You’re hiking at an altitude where altitude sickness is a genuine risk.
- The route is remote and unsigned with no accommodation, so you’d be carrying a tent and your food.
- The hike legally requires a licensed guide.
- You enjoy the planning, in which case plan it yourself and keep your money.
- You’re on a tight budget. A self-guided hiking tour is good value for what it covers, but organising everything yourself will always cost less.
| Type of hike | What makes it that way | Best booked as |
|---|---|---|
| Popular Alpine hut routes (Tour du Mont Blanc, Alta Via 1, the Haute Route) | Well marked and busy, but accommodation books out months in advance and some stages have only a handful of places to stay | Self-guided |
| Coastal and village-to-village routes (Croatia, Cinque Terre, Costa Brava) | Gentler terrain, plenty of places to stay, straightforward navigation | Self-guided |
| Routes with a bed every hour or two (the Camino de Santiago) | You can decide over lunch how far you’re going today | Plan it yourself |
| Day hikes, anywhere | Minimal planning and no accommodation to book | Plan it yourself |
| High-altitude treks where altitude sickness is likely (Everest Base Camp) | Somebody needs to be watching you and able to arrange a rescue | Guided |
| Remote routes with no signage and no infrastructure (the Jordan Trail, Dana to Petra) | You’re carrying a tent and food, you’ll see few other hikers, and reception is patchy | Guided |
| Hikes that legally require a guide (Kilimanjaro) | Tanzania requires every climber to summit with a licensed guide, per the Tanzania Tourist Board, and at that altitude it is the right call anyway. This is the one tour of ours that is fully guided | Guided |
Self-Guided Hiking Tour Routes We Run
Every trail below is one we hike, research and re-check ourselves, with trusted local partners on the ground in each region. We’ve been running self-guided hiking tours in Europe for 8 years and writing about these trails for 16, and we’re rated 4.9 out of 5 from 187 reviews. Our biggest single source of new bookings is past clients sending their friends, which is the only review metric I really trust.
- Italy: Alta Via 1, Seiser Alm to Rosengarten and Val Gardena and Alpe di Siusi in the Italian Dolomites, Cinque Terre and beyond, and Gran Paradiso in the Italian Alps
- France, Italy and Switzerland: the Tour du Mont Blanc self-guided hiking tour through the French, Italian and Swiss Alps, and the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt across the French and Swiss Alps
- Spain: the Spanish Pyrenees in Catalonia, the Mountains of Catalonia, the Alpujarras and Sierra Nevada near Granada, and the Costa Brava south coast
- Croatia: our Croatia hiking tour from Split to Dubrovnik along the Dalmatian coast
- Ireland: the Wicklow Way
- Turkey: the Lycian Way along the Turquoise Coast
- Or browse all our hiking tours in Europe, and the best hikes in Europe if you’re still choosing a trail.
Common Questions About Self-Guided Hiking Tours
What is the difference between a self-guided hiking tour and a guided hiking tour?
The difference between a self-guided hiking tour and a guided hiking tour is who is on the trail with you. On both, a company books your accommodation, plans the route and handles transfers. On a guided tour a qualified mountain guide hikes with you and a group, sets the pace and navigates. On a self-guided hiking tour nobody hikes with you: you follow GPS tracks and route notes at your own pace, with only the people you brought. A guided tour costs more, because you are paying for the guide.
Are self-guided hiking tours worth it for experienced hikers?
Self-guided hiking tours are worth it for experienced hikers when the obstacle is accommodation rather than terrain. On routes like the Tour du Mont Blanc, Alta Via 1 and the Haute Route, beds need booking months in advance, the accommodations along them open their reservations at different times, and a few stages have only a handful of places to sleep. Hiking experience does not help with any of that. If you are heading somewhere with beds to spare and no booking race, plan it yourself and enjoy it.
What is a self-guided tour?
A self-guided tour is an organised trip where a company arranges the logistics but nobody accompanies you. The term covers hiking, cycling and rail, and a self-guided trip works the same way in each one: you get the route, the bookings and the documents, and you get yourself from each start to each finish. A self-guided hiking tour is the hiking version, with accommodation booked along a multi-day trail, GPS tracks and written route notes.
Is a self-guided hiking tour cheaper than a guided hiking tour?
A self-guided hiking tour is cheaper than a guided hiking tour, because you are not paying for a mountain guide’s time and expenses for the length of the trip. You still get the route planning, the accommodation, the GPS tracks and support while you hike. What you do not get is a person hiking beside you, and on a well-signed European trail that is a large cost for something the waymarking is already doing for you.
Do self-guided hiking tours include meals?
Whether a self-guided hiking tour includes meals depends on the route. On stages with mountain accommodation, dinner and breakfast are often part of the stay. In villages and towns you will usually be choosing for yourself, which is half the fun. Every Monkeys and Mountains tour page sets out exactly which meals are included on that route, so read the one you are considering rather than assuming.
What happens on a self-guided hiking tour if the weather turns bad?
If the weather turns bad on a Monkeys and Mountains self-guided hiking tour, you have WhatsApp support throughout your trip through our trusted local partners, and this is exactly the kind of call we are there for: whether to take the lower variant, whether to sit the day out, whether a pass is sensible today. Many of our routes have an easier alternative for a given day, which is one of the quiet advantages of not being tied to a group’s schedule. Nobody is pushing you over a col because the itinerary says Thursday.
Will you be hiking alone on a self-guided hiking tour?
You will not be hiking alone on a self-guided hiking tour unless you want to be. You hike with whoever you booked with: your partner, your friends, or nobody, if solo is the entire point. On popular routes like the Tour du Mont Blanc you will pass other hikers all day and share tables with them in the evenings. What you will not have is an assigned group you are expected to keep up with.
Who should not book a self-guided hiking tour?
You should not book a self-guided hiking tour if the route needs a guide rather than a plan. That means hikes at altitude where altitude sickness is likely, remote routes with no signage, no huts and no reliable phone reception, and trails that legally require a licensed guide, such as the such as Kilimanjaro, where Tanzania requires a licensed guide. Skip one too if you genuinely enjoy the planning, because the planning is the main thing you are paying us to take away, or if you are on a tight budget: organising everything yourself will always cost less than any tour.
Should You Book a Self-Guided Hiking Tour, a Guided Tour, or Plan It Yourself?
Three ways to hike a route, and only one of them fits the hike you have in mind. If it’s a well-signed European trail where the real obstacle is accommodation rather than terrain, a self-guided hiking tour removes the obstacle and leaves you the hiking. If it’s a day hike, or a trail with a bed every hour, go and plan it yourself and enjoy that too. And if it’s at altitude, unsigned, or legally needs a guide, hire the guide and don’t think twice.
Still weighing up trails? Our free AI Hike Finder asks about your fitness, your dates and the kind of scenery you’re after, and matches you to a route in a few minutes instead of a few weeks. And if you want to go deeper on the difference between hiking, trekking and mountaineering, or on the hiking apps worth having on your phone, we have a post for that too.
Find the self-guided hiking tour that fits you
Tell us your fitness level, your dates and the scenery you’re after, and we’ll match you to a route. Rated 4.9/5 from 187 reviews, and our biggest source of new bookings is past clients sending their friends.
