Hello hikers, many in the group suggest that there's no need to book accommodation in advance and that one may just show up at the guesthouses. Running tours professionally, I would like to share what the hosts tell us, my perspective and the trends I observe:
1) Situation: Hospitality is part of the Balkan DNA. The Albanian highland's customary law goes as far as to say that your house doesn't belong to you, but god and the guests. That means the hosts will go out of their way to not leave you in the rain or go hungry.
2) Hosts: Now imagine yourself the host of a family-run guesthouse in a rural destination. It's a long drive from the next shopping opportunity, there's a very basic kitchen and you complete all tasks yourself: Washing, cleaning, cooking, serving.... Not knowing how many guests to expect and the difficulties that brings, has become the daily norm of your life.
3) Food: You want to feed everyone but also don't like to waste food, effort or money doing so for an unknown number of mouths. You can only really see one way forward: To serve large enough quantities of cheap, basic and quick to prepare meals and hope for it to last. While food is rarely running short, this results in the quality and diversity of meals deteriorating in many places. At some point, guests will eat day-by-day white cheese, tomato-cucumber salad, byrek and rice with frozen meat.
4) Accommodation: You also have only so many rooms, beds and bathrooms. Being unclear how many will arrive today, you keep accommodating everyone, but loose the overview of how many there are along the way may as you're busy preparing food. If you knew in advance that are more guests than you can comfortably accommodate, you may recommend the neighbors guesthouse to some instead.
5) Reservations: You start neglecting your bookings wondering whether it's worthwhile the time it takes to manage them. Why to take reservations at all, when you cannot make plans because of so many unannounced guests? It appears to you that visitors prefer to show up without prior notice and that they're fine with the bare minimums standard. When it works for them, why shouldn't it for you and bother change anything?
6) Result: A loss-loss situation for everyone. On busy days, the hosts are overwhelmed and stressed by last moment arrangements, leave alone to find time to connect with guests. As a visitor, you may find yourself queuing up for the not so clean bathroom, accommodated in subpar conditions and waiting for your turn to eat - there's not enough space inside and rain outside. Overall it feels crowded and not as hospitable as you expected and heard from people who completed the trail in the past.
The frequency and degree of the described situation occurring varies by the location. The more remote it is and fewer hosts there are, the more problematic these issues become.
All said, I appreciate that it's time consuming and not easy to plan an itinerary in advance, that there are unknowns and many hosts not easily bookable online. It's somewhat of a chicken-egg problem, without there being demand for bookings, the rural hosts with limited digital literacy won't invest serious time and effort to ease the process. Overall, I would just like to raise awareness of the situation in the hope that visitors make a reasonable effort to contact the hosts / book their stays in advance - for the benefit of everyone involved.
Thanks for your consideration.