Hotels in Auli: Which Ones Are Actually at Auli, and What a Night Costs

by Nav & Vandana Sharma · Published 25 September 2026 · Figures last verified 15 September 2026

We checked in to Satopanth The Auli Resort at 01:20 on 25 January 2026, after waiting in Jyotirmath from 17:45 to 23:00 the night before for the road up to open. Its name says Auli, and so does our own trip sheet, but it's near the TV Tower at Sunil, on the road below the top. Our October 2024 night, at Auli Eco Nature Resort, was below the top too. The one time we've slept at the top of Auli was at GMVN, in June 2025.

That's the trouble with hotels in Auli, Uttarakhand: the name runs a long way further down the hill than the slope does. One listing site files 24 properties under Auli, and by its own location text only 11 of them are at the top, three of those tent camps. The rest are on the road below, in Jyotirmath, or give no location at all. This is the Auli in Chamoli district, above the town of Jyotirmath, which most maps and booking sites still call Joshimath.

Why did two of our three Auli stays turn out to be below Auli?

Because a hotel can carry Auli in its name and sit several kilometres down the hill, and a booking page won't make you check. Here are our three trips, with the rupees where we have them.

October 2024. We drove up in our own Baleno and spent two nights at Hotel Kailasha Inn on Badrinath Road in Joshimath, at Rs 2,399 a night. Then we had one night at Auli Eco Nature Resort for Rs 5,999, two of us both times. The resort's address is Auli Road, Lower Auli, Joshimath. The night with Auli in the name cost two and a half times as much as the Joshimath hotel and still wasn't at the top.

June 2025. We went for the green season, by bus from Delhi to Jyotirmath and a shared jeep up, and stayed at GMVN at the top. We kept no record of the room or what it cost, so nothing on this page about GMVN's rooms comes from that stay.

January 2026. We drove the Thar up from Greater Noida, with two nights booked at Satopanth at Rs 7,200 a night plus Rs 943 in tax and fees, Rs 16,286 for the pair. Its own contact page writes the address as "Auli Near TV Tower Sunil Joshimath". After the wait in Jyotirmath, the first of the two nights we'd paid for began in the small hours. Our trip sheet sums up the 25th as "Auli mein din, snow aur hotel stay": a day at Auli, snow, and the hotel.

Your rates will differ. These are dated examples of three kinds of place: the town, the road in October and the road in January. Two months at two different road properties don't add up to a seasonal multiple.

How many hotels are there in Auli, really?

Seven built properties plus GMVN's complex, going by the location each listing gives itself, and three tent camps on top of that. Every bigger number you'll see folds in the road below Auli, the town of Jyotirmath, or both.

Each booking site gives you a different count. On 15 September 2026 hotelsinauli.com headed its list "55 Hotels in Auli", and inside that list sat Kamet Hotel Joshimath, Auli D Hotel Joshimath and Dream Mountain Resort Joshimath. euttaranchal's list said 24. Neither says what it means by Auli.

So we took the list that prints a location against every entry and sorted it by that text alone, without judgement calls or map pins. Where the listing's own words put a property at the top, it went in the top row. Where they said Lower Auli, TV Tower, Sunil or Joshimath, it went on the road.

Two entries needed more than the listing. Blackberry Cottages is listed as plain "Auli", but its own site places it on the road near the TV Tower, below the top, so it's on the road row. And Clifftop Club's listing gives only its group name, while its own site puts it beside the artificial lake at the top.

euttaranchal is a private Dehradun company, not a government source, and as Blackberry shows, it gets some entries wrong. We used its list because it's the only one we found that writes a location against every property, and a location is the whole question here.

The district press counts the same way, and adds the part the listings leave out. Amar Ujala's Chamoli reporting on 22 December 2025 put room for more than 1,000 people across GMVN and the private hotels at Auli, with huts and tents besides. The same report says there are also a large number of hotels below Auli, near Sunil and the TV Tower, and counts those separately without numbering them.

So there are two answers to "how many hotels are in Auli": a short list at the top, and a longer, uncounted string of places on the road that borrow the name.

Before you pay, look the address up on a map and ignore the name. TV Tower, Sunil, Lower Auli, Auli Road and Parsari are all on the climb. ITBP Road, near GMVN, near the chairlift or near the lake are at the top. If the listing gives only "Auli", ring and ask how far they are from the GMVN complex. A place at the top can answer that in metres.

Which properties are actually at the top of Auli?

GMVN's complex, Mountain Rover, Casa Himalaya, Clifftop Club, Blue Poppy, Shail Shikhar Heritage, Snow City and The Auli Resort, plus three tent camps. Here is what each one publishes about price and heat.

Read that price column as a band. A listing's "starting from" is the cheapest room in the cheapest week, with no date on it, so expect the quote for your dates to be at it or above it, and well above it at New Year.

Watch the names in that table too. The Auli Resort, next to GMVN, is a different place from Satopanth The Auli Resort, where we stayed, down the road at Sunil. Same words, two places, which is the reason to read the address. The Auli Resort may also no longer trade under that name, so if a property at the top matters to your trip, ring it before you plan around it.

None of the three tent camps publishes anything about heating, and a tent at Auli in January is a cold place to sleep. Assume a tent is unheated unless the operator puts it in writing, and between December and February, skip one that won't.

What does a room in Auli cost, and how does it change by season?

At the top, listed starting prices run from Rs 1,650 at GMVN, on an undated listing, to Rs 14,900 on ITBP Road. The one property near Auli that publishes a full seasonal card charges Rs 3,000 to Rs 3,800 a night for a cottage. What we paid is in the table of our own rooms above. Every other figure on this page is somebody's listing or rate card, and each one says whose.

That card is Blackberry Cottages', on the road below the top, so read it as the shape of a season at one place. A winter night there costs Rs 500 more than a September one, and the New Year fortnight another Rs 300 on top.

May and June are priced exactly like winter: the card treats the green season as peak. The New Year premium is small on the cottage, Rs 300, and bigger on the premium room, Rs 700. Those dates are fixed months in advance, so what you're paying for is the calendar, whatever the weather does.

The card places the property two ways on the same page: 8 km from Joshimath and 3 km before the TV Tower in one line, and 3 km before main Auli in its footer. Every version is on the road, below the top. No property at the top that we checked prints a card for every season. Blackberry prints that, the heater charge, and a plain statement that it's below main Auli.

Rooms go before the weather is known. On 24 December 2024, GMVN's Auli manager Pradeep Shah told Amar Ujala that every room was booked for Christmas and New Year, while private hotels were at 60 to 70 per cent. On 22 December 2025 the same paper had GMVN's three guest houses full and overbooked, and private hotels at about 60 per cent.

The president of the Auli hotel association, Anti Prakash Shah, told it that the booking graph rises every day, and if it snows, every hotel will fill in one go (our translation from the Hindi). So a New Year room at Auli is booked on hope.

What does the room rate leave out?

Heat, often the food, the climb from Jyotirmath, and at New Year a package price. This is where Auli bills add up.

Heat. Blackberry's electric heater, Rs 1,000 a room a night on top of the room, is a third of a September cottage and just over a quarter of a New Year one, by our arithmetic on its card. Guests at other places describe heaters as a chargeable extra too. Budget for heat as a line of its own.

Food. Auli has no listed, year-round place to eat outside the hotels, so you rely on whichever kitchen you booked. Seasonal stalls turn up on the paths when there is snow, and they are luck rather than catering. Rate cards quote EP, room only, as the headline, so check what CP and MAP cost before you compare two places on the room price. If you want restaurants, a market or anything to do after dark, stay in Jyotirmath, which has all three.

New Year. Satopanth sold its New Year 2025 as a two-night package for 30 to 31 December or 31 December to 1 January, at Rs 32,500 a couple, meals and a gala night included. A package like that is priced on the date, and the snow is extra luck. Why that week is the most expensive of a month that's usually short of snow is in the guide to Auli in December. If snow is the reason for your trip, skip the package: you'd pay peak for a week that was thin or bare in three of the last four years, and the four-winter snow record shows which weeks delivered.

The climb. If your own car can't go up, the transfer from Jyotirmath was fixed at Rs 1,500 one way and Rs 2,500 for a same-day return on 29 December 2024, five passengers to a vehicle. No official has named a figure since. The caveats are with the climb's fare record.

Cash and fuel. Auli has no ATM and no fuel pump. Both are in Jyotirmath.

Do Auli hotels have heating, and what happens when the power goes?

Most properties list a heater, several charge for it, and in the guest reviews we collected every heater that worked was an electric one. So the question that matters is what happens to the heater when the supply drops, and at Auli the supply drops.

Where the power comes from. Auli hangs off the Jyotirmath block's supply. On 31 August 2025 two lines failed together, the 66 kV line from Karnaprayag and the 33 kV Birahi Ganga line, and the whole block went dark, with nothing else to keep it lit. The December outage figures for the district's rural feeders are on the December page.

What the reviews say. In the dated guest reviews we collected, good and bad, the heaters that kept rooms warm were oil column heaters, blowers and electric blankets. Nobody describes a generator running the room heaters through a cut. One guest who asked found there was no generator at all.

What our own stays add. At both places we stayed in October 2024, Hotel Kailasha Inn in Joshimath and Auli Eco Nature Resort at Lower Auli, there was power backup and the room heater was set up to run on it.

It was October, neither place is at the top, and we have no power cut on record at either, so it says nothing about the resorts at the slope or GMVN. It does show the question has a real answer that a property can give you. Our January 2026 stay at Satopanth recorded nothing either way about power or heating, so that stays a gap.

Read the backup column carefully. "Partial" is doing work in Clifftop's sentence, and "scheduled" in the two ITBP Road listings: Mountain Rover's says its generator runs at scheduled timings only, which is not the same as whenever the power goes. A genset "during cuts" at Blackberry doesn't say whether it runs the Rs 1,000 heater or the lights. And the most useful line in the table comes from a resort telling its own customers to check before they book.

Which Auli hotels take guests in winter?

We couldn't find a list of which properties shut for winter, in English or in Hindi, so this is the next best thing: named places with dated proof that they had guests in a named winter month. Proof for a past winter isn't a promise for the next one.

Notice what the table can't tell you. A rate card for November to February says the owner intends to open. A guest report says somebody slept there that month. Neither says the kitchen is running in the week you want, or that the road to the door is open. So ring the week before you travel and ask two things: is the kitchen cooking dinner that week, and how will they get you to the door if tourist vehicles are restricted on the climb. Treat a vague answer to either as a no.

GMVN Auli: what are the state's rooms like, and how do you book them?

GMVN, the state tourism corporation, runs three places at the top of Auli. They fill first at Christmas, and the room type you get decides whether you're warm. GMVN's booking system names them Auli Ski Resort, Nanda Devi Eco Tourist Resort and Cloud End. Amar Ujala calls them the Ski Resort, Nanda Devi and Cloud Inn guest houses.

How big is it? Amar Ujala gave the three together room for about 300 people in December 2025. GMVN's own skiing page, when we read it on 5 September 2026, gave its Auli resort 110 beds. Those don't agree, and they may not be counting the same thing: people against beds, and three properties or one.

What the rooms are. An undated listing for the GMVN tourist bungalow gives 2 super deluxe, 4 semi deluxe and 21 deluxe rooms, plus a 12-bed dormitory, from Rs 1,650. MakeMyTrip quoted a deluxe room at Rs 4,464 a night with breakfast on 5 September 2026, for a late-December stay.

The one thing to ask for is a brick room. A guest in December 2018 described GMVN's cheapest rooms as "basically aluminium cabins", where "the room heater provided may not be very effective", and like "a deep freezer at night". The same guest found the semi-deluxe brick rooms "quite cozy". That review is nearly eight years old, and nothing in GMVN's own material addresses the difference, so don't accept "deluxe" as the answer when you book. Ask whether the room is brick or a cabin, and get it written on the confirmation.

Getting there. GMVN sits at the chairlift base, at the far end of the climb. A Team-BHP member who went up in February 2024 was told no shared cab runs to the GMVN resort and paid Rs 1,000 for a private drop. The fixed fare and what people pay are on the transfer page.

Booking it. Use gmvnonline.com, or ring the numbers on that site. We couldn't get a room tariff out of GMVN's booking site on 15 September 2026, so we can't quote you a live GMVN rate, and no aggregator's number stands in for one. In December 2025 its Auli rooms for 25 to 31 December were sold out by the 8th, so for that week book early or don't count on GMVN. Its ski courses with lodging put you in a dormitory, and what that course costs is on the GMVN course ladder.

Should you stay at the top of Auli, on the road, or in Jyotirmath?

Skiing or deep winter: the top. A tight budget, a market or May to October: Jyotirmath. The road in between is the one we'd pick last in snow, because it's neither the slope nor the town, and it sits on the stretch that freezes.

The old advice was to stay in Jyotirmath and ride the cable car up in minutes. The Joshimath to Auli ropeway hasn't carried a passenger since January 2023, and no restart date has been announced, so a base in town means 11 to 16 km of road each way, depending on the route. The record is on the ropeway's status page, and the full town-against-slope argument is in our Auli guide. The third option, the road, is the one the listings blur.

The road properties are real value in a clear month. A Rs 3,000 September cottage near the TV Tower against a listing from Rs 11,500 on ITBP Road is a big gap, and in a clear month the road up is simply a road.

In snow the arithmetic turns over. On 25 January 2026, our day up there, the frost points named were Sunil, TV Tower and Kichad Bend, all on that stretch, and above the TV Tower only four-wheel drives and local vehicles were let through. Our hotel was at Sunil. A room on that stretch leaves you a drive to the chairlift on exactly the road that's giving trouble.

Vandana says a cottage on the road is a fair choice for a couple who aren't skiing, even in winter. It's cheaper, it's still above Jyotirmath, and if the point of the trip is a quiet room and a view, you don't drive anywhere once you've arrived.

Nav's point is our own January booking: we were on that road, and the wait that night was for the road, not the room. A road hotel puts you on that stretch twice a day if you want the slope.

Where we agree: for skiing, or anything that needs the chairlift in January and February, pay for the top. For a winter trip that's about the view and the cold, with no skiing, a road property is fine if it can collect you when tourist vehicles are stopped. From May to October on a budget, take Jyotirmath or the road, whichever has the room you like.

Where should you stay at the end of the drive from Delhi?

In Jyotirmath, at about 1,875 m. It's a sensible intermediate stop for the altitude, it's where the fuel, the ATMs and the food are, and it's below the part of the road that shuts.

Auli starts at roughly 2,500 m, around the height where altitude illness becomes possible, and driving straight up from the plains in one day is how people get caught. Sleeping lower first is general advice, not medical advice, and being fit doesn't protect you.

The winter reason is our own January night. We had dinner and tea in Jyotirmath while we waited for the road, and the climb after it took two hours twenty minutes in a four-wheel drive, to a hotel below the top. That's the opposite of what a first night at altitude should be. Coming down, we left Satopanth at 08:45 on the 26th and spent that night at MVT Resort in Tapovan, Rishikesh, before the drive home.

So book the first night in Jyotirmath, and make it one you can cancel late. If you get in with daylight and the road is clear, you can still go up. If you arrive after dark in winter, you already have a bed. The whole drive, leg by leg, is on the Delhi to Auli route page.

Staying close to the slope: which properties are nearest the chairlift?

GMVN's complex is beside the chairlift base, and the ITBP Road resorts are a short walk from it. Nothing on the road below is walkable to the lift.

By their own listings, Casa Himalaya is a "200 mtr walk" from the base "chair car station", which is their name for the chairlift, and Mountain Rover is at "400 mtr walking distance" from it. A Goibibo listing sells a property next to GMVN as "Auli Resort (10m walk from ChairCar)", which may be The Auli Resort in the table above.

Clifftop Club, up by the lake, is reached by the chairlift, which its Goibibo listing says runs until 3 pm, or by a 4 km military-controlled road that needs a four-wheel drive. Ask Clifftop how your bags reach the door in January.

The chairlift itself is 800 m long, sits inside Auli and costs Rs 500 a person. It's a different machine from the closed cable car from town, so be wary of any hotel sold on its closeness to the ropeway. Satopanth's own blog puts the "main Auli Ropeway station" 10 to 15 minutes away, and a travel guide dated 10 July 2025 still sells hotels on being able to "walk to the lower base point of the cable car".

Hotels in Auli: FAQ

Nav & Vandana Sharma

We're a husband-and-wife travel team based in Greater Noida. Nav has been travelling across India since 2015 and does the routes, costs and logistics; Vandana joined the road in 2020 and writes the stays, food, comfort and safety, which is most of this page.

It draws on all three of our Auli trips. The rates are from our trip sheets: two nights in Joshimath and one at Lower Auli in October 2024, and two at Sunil in January 2026. We also stayed at GMVN at the top in June 2025, but kept no record of the room or the rate. The counts, rate cards, heating claims and press reports are from our research, each checked against the listing, property or paper that published it.

Corrections: hello@wctoindia.com. Tell us the page and what is wrong, and we'll fix it and date the change in the log below.