There are many reasons to take a self-guided tour to the Alps. Perhaps you don't want to be part of a group, maybe you have your own family or group, or just prefer to explore on your own. Many people have restrictive travel dates that don't match up with our guided tours, and a self-guided tour becomes the best option for your schedule. Plus, self-guided tours are more flexible (in the planning stages) and affordable than guided tours, generally running about 2/3 the cost of a comparable guided tour. We've designed self-guided tours as short as 2 days or as long as 3 weeks, and take pride in finding just the right itinerary for your needs. We can arrange quiet, intimate tours for two or larger getaways for groups of friends, work colleagues, or family reunions. You can stay in absolute luxury of 4 or 5-star hotels or take in the rustic ambiance of remote mountain inns or alpine club huts. The choice is yours!

We offer a variety of well-tested self-guided packages - self-guided versions of many of our guided tours that have proven to be very popular with our clients. We can also customize any of these tours to lengthen or shorten them, add inn-to-inn stretches or extended village stays, and upgrade or downgrade accommodations and railpasses. We only arrange self-guided tours in the areas we know and love best, and you'll benefit from the experience and expertise accumulated as a former year-round resident of Switzerland and long-time hiking guide. We know the inns and the locations, and will direct you to the best options Switzerland has to offer.

Consider adding nights in Lucerne, Zürich, or Geneva at the end of your trip. We have comfortable, clean 3-star hotels and luxurious 4-star hotels all in great locations, or simple, affordable airport hotels can be arranged.

Choose from these suggested self-guided options:

Switzerland: Lucerne, Zürich, or Geneva, Austria: Innsbruck, Salzburg or Vienna, France: Paris, Germany: Munich, Italy: Bolzano, Venice, Verona or Milan

These self-guided tour prices are per person based on 2-4 people sharing double rooms. There is a small single supplement for single travelers, and we can arrange discounted prices for larger groups.

Our self-guided tours typically include prepaid hotels with breakfast and dinner, an appropriate railpass or airport shuttle for travel to and from the airport or border, carefully detailed route descriptions (including longer, shorter, and rainy day options), hiking maps with highlighted routes, instructions for independently sending luggage ahead, and lots of useful information that will help your trip run smoothly.

Not included are lunches, drinks with your meals, extras (such as laundry, phone calls from the room, etc), transportation not covered by your rail pass, or the cost of luggage transport. Exact details vary slightly from tour to tour, so see the individual tour descriptions for complete details.

Our route descriptions are detailed and descriptive, with elevation guides, longer and shorter options, ideas for rainy days, and are customized to fit your trip. View a sample route description.

We use maps from the Swiss Topographic Office, works of art that are the best available, and include a larger fold-out map of the region as well as page-size maps for daily use with your route highlighted. View part of a sample hiking map.

The 8-day Best of Switzerland tour is designed to visit some of the absolute highlights on a quick trip, minimizing travel times and spending maximum time at each destination. The 11-day Switzerland's Scenic Trains tour adds a couple new destinations, and has generally longer travel times, enjoying Switzerland's most famous scenic train journeys, such as the Glacier Express and Bernina Express. The 13-day Swiss Sampler tour adds the scenic Goldenpass train route and a couple days in Montreux, along the shores of beautiful lake Geneva, also allowing time for the optional Chocolate train to the Gruyeres region.

All of our Swiss train self-guided itineraries are easy, enjoyable ways to see the wonderful diversity that Switzerland has to offer, and can be done by car as well as train. As always, these itineraries can be customized to fit your travel plans.

Small changes to our self-guided itineraries are done essentially at cost. You're not charged any extra fee for this level of customization. Examples might be adding a night or two at one of your destinations, subtracting nights to shorten a tour, changing to a different railpass, or upgrading a hotel or room. We have a lot of great itineraries, and hopefully there is something there that will meet your needs. If you'd like a completely customized itinerary, we're happy to put together thoughtful proposals for you, and pricing in this case will be slightly higher than our comparable standard itineraries, reflecting the extra work involved in planning and organizing customized trips.

Private guided tours can also be arranged for itineraries that might be more complicated on a self-guided basis, such as the Haute Route, inn-to-inn tours through the Dolomites, or the Tour of Mont Blanc. See our Private Guided Tours section for some of our standard options, and give us a call or email to start working on the right itinerary for your family or group.