Abstract ID: 3.11151 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

A mountain hut is a building in an isolated alpine location, not accessible by normal roads, equipped for overnight stays and with a kitchen and indoor toilets. The hut can be managed or unmanaged. If managed, there is a manager who provides meals and beds to customers who pay a fee. In the past, the managed hut offered a sober welcome to visitors to the mountain because of the view of its users (who were willing to forego comfort). Nowadays, the mountain is visited by a greater number of people with different purposes: in addition to sportsmen and women who use the hut as a stopover, there is an increasing number of excursionists who make the hut their destination. The increase in the number of users of the alpine environment has led to an increase of customers, even if only potential customers, of mountain huts, with significant consequences: the hut is transformed into a business, a firm susceptible to high profitable entrepreneurial management, entrepreneurial management which becomes a factor in the increase in the number of its users. In order to maximise profits, the entrepreneurial manager has an interest in attracting as many customers as possible. He is therefore encouraged to offer quality standards that are increasingly similar to those of a hotel, in order to attract those who are not interested in destinations other than the hut and who are not prepared to sacrifice comfort. The refuge is becoming more welcoming. But not only that. The hut is becoming the driving force and theatre for leisure and cultural initiatives, even those not strictly related to the mountains. Technological developments make it possible to offer services and activities that were unthinkable in the past. The offer expands to the point where the hut becomes an emotional place, a place where customers go for increasingly constructed and expensive experiences. The emotional hut increases its negative impact on the surrounding environment: entrepreneurial management pushes for the expansion of the structure and easier access to it, by motor vehicles, the bringing of the city into the mountains.