UKC

Heading out to Trentino in February and looking for advice on cheap accommodation. In particular, huts and winter rooms? 

Any general advice for the area gratefully received also!

A lot of the CAI (Club Alpine Italiano) Rifugi have winter rooms open, you can find some basic info in Italian including winter room space at their website here:

https://www.cai.it/andare-in-montagna/rifugi-e-bivacchi/rifugi-del-club-alp...

Bivouac huts:

https://www.cai.it/andare-in-montagna/rifugi-e-bivacchi/bivacchi-del-club-a...

Or SAT here, for Trentino:

http://www.sat.tn.it/rifugi/elenco-rifugi

(if you click on the "Aperture" there, it shows the dates they are open during the season, they also have a pretty handy interactive map with routes, refuges and bivouacs on their website - https://trentino.webmapp.it)

"Invernale" means winter, so Letto: 120 Invernale: 6 means 120 places in Summer, 6 in winter room.

I have only been in the area in the Autumn (so we did use the winter rooms, because most of the refuges were already closed after summer season), the only problem was (obviously, in dry Dolomites) with water, since there was no snow cover yet for melting our own (and many refuges rely on very long buried hoses and pumping equipment to get water, all of which had been winterised). In February, you will probably have plenty of snow to melt though We relied on lugging some ice back to the hut from the glacier to melt.

I would suggest contacting them with your itinerary to learn if you need to borrow some special key (like the OeAV winterraum key) for the winter rooms or not (ours were open, but you never know )

When UKC is good, it's really good. 

Thanks so much for all this helpful info, Frank!