Tour du Mont Blanc accommodation: where to stay and how to plan it

What makes accommodation planning different here

The TMB is a hut route with villages attached. Most nights are spent in a refuge, gite d'etape or auberge on half board (dinner, bed, breakfast), and in the villages the same walkers fill small hotels and campsites. There is no single owner: each refuge is run by its own guardian or family, plus a few institutional huts (the French Alpine Club chalet at Les Contamines, the CAI Mondovi bivouac above Val Ferret). What ties them together is one booking route. The Association des refuges et gites du Tour du Mont-Blanc sells beds across all three countries through montourdumontblanc.com, and its own FAQ states 'Reservations for summer 2026 will open for all huts on October 15, 2025', so the pattern is that the following summer opens in the autumn. The same page is explicit that 'Only the huts that are part of the Association of Huts and Guesthouses of the Tour du Mont Blanc can be booked online', which is the trap: anything outside the association (village hotels, all the campsites, the Swiss municipal pitches at Le Peuty and Trient, the CAF chalet at Les Contamines, the unmanned CAI bivouacs) has to be booked separately or not at all. July and August on the classic stages are commonly gone by late winter, and the small huts go within days of opening. Half board is the norm rather than an option; some places sell a bed only, and a few sell nothing else, so read the one night and meals lines per property. Two stages have very little slack. Between Courmayeur and Les Chapieux the only places actually on the route in upper Val Veny are Cabane du Combal and Rifugio Elisabetta; at Les Chapieux the choice is Auberge de la Nova, Les Chambres du Soleil and, an hour further up the Vallee des Glaciers, Refuge des Mottets. If those are full the fallback is a bus down to Courmayeur or Bourg-Saint-Maurice, which is a lost day rather than a short diversion. Country differences worth knowing: the French huts quote in euros and several still refuse cards (la Nova and Les Mottets both say cash or French cheque only), the Swiss ones quote in Swiss francs and mostly take cards, and the Italian side has the fewest beds per kilometre. One shared platform, montourdumontblanc.com, run by the association of TMB huts and guesthouses, covering member refuges and gites in France, Italy and Switzerland. Its FAQ states 'Reservations for summer 2026 will open for all huts on October 15, 2025' and that 'Only the huts that are part of the Association of Huts and Guesthouses of the Tour du Mont Blanc can be booked online'. Non-member beds, and every campsite on the route, are booked direct with the operator or are first-come. Popular summer dates on the classic stages are usually gone months ahead, so treat the autumn opening as the moment to book if you are walking in July or August. A handful of places set their own terms on top: the French Alpine Club chalet at Les Contamines will not sell a bed-only night online at all, and the Auberge de la Boerne at Tre-le-Champ is listed as half board compulsory. Mid-June to mid-September is the working season. Refuges open in sequence from around mid-June and most shut in the second half of September: Cabane du Combal is listed June to September, Refuge de Bellachat gives 20 June to 27 September 2026, the FFCAM chalet at Les Contamines gives 5 June to 19 September 2026, La Ferme a Piron 17 June to 26 September, Refuge Le Peuty 11 May to 1 October and Camping des Glaciers at La Fouly 8 May to 4 October. Snow lies on the high cols (Col des Fours, Fenetre d'Arpette, Grand Col Ferret) into late June in most years, which is a mountaineering problem rather than a walking one. Outside the season the passes are unwalkable for most people, the huts are shut and only the valley hotels in Chamonix, Les Houches and Champex stay open. Les Houches is the conventional start and finish. Geneva airport is about an hour and a quarter away by shared or private shuttle; from Chamonix the Mont Blanc Express train reaches Les Houches in roughly fifteen minutes and local buses run through the day, neither needing a booking. Courmayeur is the usual Italian entry and Bourg-Saint-Maurice the rail head for the Les Chapieux side. Because the route is a loop with good bus and rail links at Chamonix, Courmayeur, Champex and Bourg-Saint-Maurice, a missed booking can usually be patched by dropping into a valley for the night. Camping is much more restricted than the campsite dots suggest, and the rules change at each border. La Chamoniarde's guide defines bivouac as sleeping out or pitching a light tent from sunset to sunrise, one night in a place, leaving no trace and lighting no fire, as distinct from wild camping. In the Aosta Valley (the whole Italian section) 'Toutes les formes de stationnement ou de campement sont interdites', bivouac is banned below 2500 m and the fine is EUR 566, which in practice rules out wild camping on the Italian stages. In Switzerland wild camping is banned in general, with narrow exceptions for a single night, not in a group, above the tree line. Bovernier and Martigny-Combe have no official pitch at all; Orsieres allows it only on designated ground (Champex and La Fouly campsites); Trient bans wild camping but runs the pitch at Le Peuty and a communal site. In France, Chamonix has banned camping and bivouac since 1992 apart from bivouac at altitude between sunset and sunrise, and the Aiguilles Rouges reserves require a free but compulsory pitch booking at bivouac.nature-haute-savoie.fr. Les Houches tolerates one night's bivouac sunset to sunrise. Les Contamines allows it in dedicated areas only, and bans it around the Lacs Jovet and Plan Jovet from 1 July to 30 August. At Bourg-Saint-Maurice there is one official bivouac area at Les Chapieux, with the whole Vallee des Glaciers off limits because it is alpage and private land. Vallorcine bans wild camping outright but allows bivouac above 1700 m. The practical answer for a walker with a tent is a chain of real campsites (Bellevue at Les Houches, Le Pontet at Les Contamines, the Chamonix valley sites, Les Rocailles at Champex, Camping des Glaciers at La Fouly, the Le Peuty ground at Trient) plus the Bellachat bivouac area, rather than pitching where the mood takes you. Half board on the TMB means a set three-course dinner cooked in a small kitchen with everything carried or driven up, so the honest answer is that vegetarians are catered for almost everywhere and vegans have to give notice and carry a buffer. Alpine cooking is built on the two things a vegan cannot eat: cheese and cured pork. Tartiflette, croute au fromage, fondue, raclette, polenta concia, diots and the Valaisan assiette are all off the list, and a mountain soup is very often started with a meat or chicken stock, so ask rather than assume. The dishes that do work are soupe de legumes when the stock is vegetable, ratatouille, lentils, plain polenta, pasta with tomato, potatoes, and bread with jam at breakfast. Plant milk is not a given: several refuges have it, many do not, and carrying a small bag of oat powder solves a lot of breakfasts. Refuge Le Peuty at Trient is the clearest case on the route, its own site saying it is a 'Great choice for vegetarians & vegans'. A vegan walker's 2025 stage-by-stage diary reports being fed properly at Hotel Saint-Antoine in Les Houches (buffet breakfast with plant milks), Chalet Nant Rouge at Les Contamines (vegan baguettes made up for the day), Refuge des Mottets above Les Chapieux (bean and vegetable soup, then a vegan burger with ratatouille and rice), Pension en Plein Air at Champex-Lac (smoked tofu with herbed potatoes and spinach) and Hotel Edelweiss at La Fouly (smoked tofu with rice, lentils and ratatouille), in every case after emailing ahead. That is the pattern worth copying: say what you eat at the moment you book, then confirm a week or two out, in the local language if you can. Useful wording is 'je suis vegetalien / vegetalienne: pas de viande, pas de poisson, pas de produits laitiers, pas d'oeufs, pas de miel' in France and Switzerland, and 'sono vegano / vegana: niente carne, pesce, latticini, uova o miele' in Italy. Note that 'vegetarien' and 'vegetariano' are usually understood as ovo-lacto, and 'vegetalien' or 'vegano' is the word that means vegan. Supermarkets in Chamonix, Les Houches, Les Contamines, Courmayeur and Champex carry tofu, plant milk and bars; between them, at Les Chapieux, Le Peuty and in Val Ferret, the answer is carry your own. Prices below are what the operator or a dated listing published in July 2026 and are recorded with the date seen; refuges reprice every season. Several French places take neither cards nor foreign cheques (Auberge de la Nova and Refuge des Mottets both say so in writing), so carry euros for the Les Chapieux side and francs for the Swiss stages, though the Col de la Forclaz takes both currencies. Dormitory beds almost always come with duvet and pillow but many French huts require a sleeping bag liner, a drap de sac, which weighs nothing and is refused entry without: the FFCAM chalet at Les Contamines makes it compulsory, and Bellachat expects your own liner or bag. Where a place is a duplicate map object rather than a business (the second Chapieux bivouac record, the second Pierre Semard record, the unnamed hostel beside the Auberge du Mont-Blanc at Trient), it is flagged as such and should not be counted as a separate bed.