How we run the Everest Base Camp trek, and what you can hold us to

Acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb higher. On this route it is done by sleeping two extra nights at two particular heights on the way up, instead of walking straight through. Those two nights are the difference between a trek that mostly works and a trek that mostly does not, and we do not sell a version with one of them removed.

Where the two nights sit. The first is at Namche Bazaar (3,440 m (11,286 ft)). The second is at Dingboche (4,410 m (14,469 ft)). On both of those days you do not stay still. You walk up to a higher point and come back down to sleep, which is the mechanism that actually does the work. Calling them rest days makes them sound optional, so we try not to.

The commitment. We will not remove either night to make a trip shorter or cheaper, and we will not sell you a compressed itinerary because the dates you have are tight. If your dates cannot hold both, we will tell you to move the dates. That has cost us bookings and it will keep costing us bookings, which is the only reason the sentence is worth anything.

How we climb between them. We cap how much higher you sleep from one night to the next on the upper part of the route, and the guide will shorten a stage or stop early rather than push a group through a big gain on a bad day. There is a figure attached to that cap in our own material and it is not printed here. The fact store holds it as a claim rather than as something an outside authority has confirmed, and a safety number nobody has checked is worse than no number. It will appear on this page when it is verified.

Two ways of counting days, so you are not comparing the wrong ones. Our day by day Everest Base Camp itinerary counts trail days, Lukla to Lukla, meaning only the days you actually walk. A product page counts trip days, Kathmandu to Kathmandu, which is the number you are sold and which includes the arrival and departure days. Neither is wrong and they are not the same number, so check which one an operator is quoting before you compare two itineraries.

The hard thing about altitude illness is that the organ deciding whether you are ill is the organ being affected. People at altitude regularly believe they are fine while the person walking next to them can see that they are not. So the job of a guide on the upper half of this route is to make that judgment from the outside, every day, whether or not you ask.

What the guide is actually watching. How you are breathing when you stop. How much you are eating, because appetite goes before almost anything else. How you sleep, and whether you say you slept badly two nights running. How long you take to get your boots on in the morning. Your balance on uneven ground. Whether you have stopped talking. None of those is a test you can revise for, and all of them are more reliable than asking somebody how they feel.

The morning and evening check. Our guides carry a pulse oximeter, which is a clip that goes on your finger and reads the oxygen in your blood and your pulse, and they take readings on the upper stages. One reading on its own means very little, which is why the useful part is the trend across several days for the same person. A guide who reads a number and says nothing about it is not using it. A guide who reads a number and changes the plan is.

The commitment, and it is the one that costs us the most. If a guide judges that somebody should not go higher, that person does not go higher. The decision belongs to the guide and not to the customer, not to the group, and not to the office. Going down is the treatment for altitude illness and there is no other one that works on a trail, so descent is never presented as a failure and never argued about at the time. If the rest of the group is fit to continue, staff split so that nobody goes down alone and nobody is left without a guide.

What we will not promise. We will not promise that you will reach 5,364 m (17,598 ft). Nobody can promise that honestly, because it depends on how your body behaves at a height it has never been to. Any operator who guarantees it is selling you something they do not control. What the symptoms are and what to do about them is on the page about altitude sickness on the Everest Base Camp trek, and how the risks on this route actually rank is on how dangerous the Everest Base Camp trek is.

Group size is sold as comfort and it is really about attention. One guide can watch a small group closely enough to notice the things in the section above. The same guide with a large group cannot, and that is the whole reason the number matters.

Our published staffing rules. Every departure runs with a licensed guide, at a ratio of 1 per group. Our published rule for adding an assistant guide is 1 for groups of 6 or more. Both of those carry a hollow circle, and the circle is honest rather than decorative. It means these are our own published practice across our own pages rather than a figure an outside body has checked for us, and our own pages are not yet perfectly consistent with each other. We would rather show you the mark than quietly present our own copy as a verified fact.

What our guides hold. Recorded in our fact store as Government licensed, WAFA wilderness first aid claimed on the TAAN profile. Read that carefully, because it contains the word claimed and we have left it in. The government license is a document. The wilderness first aid training appears on our association profile, which is our own copy on somebody else’s website rather than a certificate we can show you per person. You can open that association record and read it without asking us. We are collecting the certificates one guide at a time and each will be published against that person’s name. Until then it is a claim and we label it as one. Our guides are named, with their roles, on the page about who guides the trek.

What we do not publish yet. A maximum group size. We hold no settled figure for it, so rather than print the number that flatters us we will tell you the actual maximum for your departure in writing when you ask us about your dates, before you pay anything. If you are comparing operators, ask each of them for the maximum rather than the average, because the maximum is the group you might end up in.

Ask us for the guide by name. We will tell you who is likely to lead your dates and confirm their license status before you travel. An operator who cannot name anybody at any point is probably going to hand your trip to a company you did not choose. That test and nine others are on the page about how to choose an Everest Base Camp trek company.

This is the section people come to this page for, so it is written as a sequence rather than as reassurance. Altitude illness is the common case. A stomach illness or an injury follows a similar shape, with the altitude part removed.

First, the plan changes rather than the person. The earliest response is almost always the boring one: stop climbing, stay at the height you are at, drink, eat, and see how the night goes. A great deal of what would have become a serious problem is dealt with by one lost day. That is part of why the schedule has slack in it.

If it does not improve, you go down, and somebody goes with you. Descent is the treatment. Not a hot drink, not a night to see, not pushing on to the next village because it is closer. A member of staff walks down with you, stays with you, and the group does not lose its guide because the staffing is built for the split.

Where the medical help on this route actually is. These are independent facilities run by other organizations and not by us, which is exactly why they are worth knowing about. There is an aid post at Pheriche (4,250 m (13,944 ft)) run by the Himalayan Rescue Association since 19731, and a hospital at Khunde (3,840 m (12,598 ft)) with 15 beds, operating since 19661. In the spring climbing season there is also a clinic at base camp itself (5,350 m (17,552 ft)). Our guides route people to these, and we would rather you knew where they are before you need them.

The free talk, which we tell everybody to attend. The Himalayan Rescue Association runs a free altitude illness lecture on this route: Daily at 3:00 pm at its aid posts during the trekking season1. We build the schedule so that our groups can go, and we recommend it whether or not you are walking with us. It costs nothing and it is the best hour on the trail.

If it needs a helicopter, your insurer sends it and our guide calls it in. Our arrangement, as our owner set it on 13 September 2026, reads in full: No standing contract. The client's own insurer dispatches, and our guides call it in from the trail. Here is what that means for you. We have no standing contract with any helicopter or rescue company, so there is no provider of ours to name. If you need to come down by helicopter, your own insurer decides and sends it under your policy. Our guide makes the call to your insurer from the trail. How a flight out of this valley actually works, and why the weather decides it, is on the safety page for this trek.

What we require of you, and it is not optional. Travel insurance that names helicopter evacuation and repatriation, and covers you to 6,000 m (19,685 ft) for this trek. If your policy does not name them, nothing of ours stands behind it. We do not sell insurance and we do not earn anything from it. We will ask you for the policy number and the insurer’s emergency phone line before you fly, and we keep them with your file so that our guide can make the call from the trail rather than looking for them at the worst possible moment. The cover level for every type of trip we run, and the exclusions that catch people out, are on the page about travel insurance for this trek.

A page of commitments is only worth reading if it also says where the commitments stop. One of the things a careful buyer would want from this page does not exist yet in a form we can publish, and it is a decision for the owner of the operating company rather than a sentence a writer can produce.

What used to sit beside it. This section once listed a second gap: how a helicopter evacuation is arranged. Our owner settled that on 13 September 2026, and the answer is published, with what it means for you, in the section on what happens when somebody gets ill.

What is true today, regardless of the open item. You must hold travel insurance that names helicopter evacuation, and we will ask to see the details before you fly. If you need a helicopter, your insurer sends it and our guide calls it in from the trail. A guide who judges that somebody should go down makes that call and it is not overruled. The costs that fall to you in each scenario are written into the quote for your dates and confirmed before you pay anything, rather than being explained to you at altitude.

Why we are telling you this rather than staying quiet. We invite people to walk to 5,364 m (17,598 ft) and we require them to insure for evacuation. Until the company adopts a written liability position, we publish nothing about liability. Almost every operator site has the same gap and almost none of them mention it. Ours is the same gap with the lid off, and the day it closes you will be able to see the date it closed on.

The same rule covers the rest of the site. Where a figure is settled we print it with its source and the date we last checked it. Where it is not, we say so. How we decide that, and how to make us correct something, is on our editorial and corrections policy.

The aircraft serving Lukla (2,860 m (9,383 ft)) do not fly in poor visibility. Flights are delayed and canceled in every season, in both directions, and nothing any operator does changes that. What an operator controls is the plan for when it happens, so here is ours.

Stuck in Kathmandu on the way in. You stay in the hotel and we hold your place on the next available flight. We tell you the same morning what the day looks like rather than leaving you at the airport to guess. If the delay runs on, we rework the itinerary in a specific order: we use the spare time first, we shorten the lower stages before the upper ones, and we do not take out an acclimatization night to catch up. If the only way to keep the trek would be to remove one of those nights, we change the trek instead.

Stuck in Lukla on the way out. This is the expensive one and it is the one people are least prepared for. We keep you in a lodge, we keep a member of staff with the group, and we talk to your airline about the flight home rather than leaving you to do it from a village. This is also the reason we tell everybody to leave a spare day at the end of the trip and not to book an international flight for the morning after the trek ends.

Helicopters, and who decides. When fixed wing flights stop for long enough, groups charter helicopters out. We will arrange it, we will tell you what it costs before anything is booked, and we will not put you on one without your agreement. We do not publish a charter figure on this site. The number that exists in our own material has not been verified to the standard the rest of these pages are held to, and a cost you may have to find at short notice is the last place for a guess.

Which airport you actually leave from. In the busiest months these flights move out of Kathmandu to Manthali Airport at Ramechhap, which means a road transfer in the early hours. We tell you that when you book rather than the night before. How the flight works, and which parts of the diversion rule are still unsettled, is on the page about the Kathmandu to Lukla flight.

The written part. Who pays for extra lodge nights, extra meals and extra staff days in each of those cases is set out in your quote before you pay, for your dates and your group. We put it in the document rather than on this page because it varies by product, and because a general sentence here would be the kind of promise that turns out not to cover your case.

Porters carry the loads that make this trip possible and they take on more physical risk than anybody else on the trail. Every operator on the internet says it treats its porters well, so the sentence is worthless. What follows is what we do, written so that you could check it on the trail.

Kit at the high stops. A porter working above the tree line needs a jacket, footwear that is right for snow, and something warm to sleep in, and it is the employer’s job to make sure he has them rather than the porter’s job to buy them out of a day rate. We provide warm clothing and equipment for the high stages.

Where they sleep and what they eat. Our porters sleep in the lodge and eat the same cooked meals as the group, rather than sleeping on a dining room floor after the guests have gone up. This is the thing most worth checking with your own eyes in a teahouse, on any trip, with any company.

Illness is treated the same way as yours. Porters are exposed to exactly the same altitude you are, usually carrying more. A porter who is unwell goes down with somebody, on the same rule described in the section above, and does not walk down alone to save a staff day.

How much a porter carries, and our cap. A published maximum load is the single most useful porter welfare commitment an operator can make, so here are both numbers side by side. On this route a porter commonly carries 25 to 30 kg. That describes what is normal on the trail, not what we do. Our own cap is 20 kg per porter, adopted on 13 September 2026. When a group’s bags come to more than that, we add another porter rather than put more on one back. The gap between those two figures is the commitment. How the two jobs are staffed is on the page about what a guide and a porter do on this trek.

Tipping is customary and it is not a wage. Tips at the end of a trek are normal on this route and we will tell you what is usual if you ask. They are not part of what anybody is paid to do the job, and no operator should be describing them as if they were.

People arrive at this subject having read a headline about rubbish on Everest. The first useful thing to say is that almost all of those headlines are about the mountain above base camp, which is climbing, and not about the walk to base camp, which is what you are doing. The two have different rules, different waste and different people.

What the published rules require of climbers. On the climbing side there are waste rules with numbers in them. Each climber must bring down a minimum of 8 kg of garbage from above base camp, and climbers and high altitude Sherpas working above the second camp a minimum of 2 kg, under rules set by the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee.2 Separately, Nepal’s mountaineering regulation, effective 8 January 2025, sets a rule for human waste on the mountain: Must be carried out in biodegradable bags.3 That same regulation sets a climbing ratio of One guide per two climbers on the highest peaks, which is a climbing rule and does not apply to the walk to base camp.

What we will not tell you about those rules. How they are checked or enforced in any given season. No authority we can source has published that, and we are not going to describe a compliance process we have not read. If you see a confident sentence about enforcement anywhere, including on an operator site, ask who published it.

How much rubbish is actually up there. We publish no tonnage figure, and you should distrust the ones you see. The numbers in circulation come from clean up campaigns of different sizes, in different years, covering different parts of the mountain, and they are quoted without any of that context. We would rather tell you the shape of the problem than give you a number we cannot stand behind.

What the trail itself is like, honestly. The route to base camp is not a rubbish dump and the photographs suggesting otherwise are almost always of the climbing camps. What it does have is a real disposal problem, because everything brought up a valley on somebody’s back has to come back down the same way, and the villages absorb far more visitors than their systems were built for. The worst of it is plastic bottles, and that one is genuinely in the hands of the people walking.

What we do. Our groups carry out what they carry in, including the packaging that comes off gear and snacks, and it leaves the valley with us rather than going into a village bin. We ask people to treat water rather than buy bottled water on the trail, which removes the single largest piece of trekker rubbish on this route. We use the lodges’ own disposal arrangements for the rest and we do not burn waste behind teahouses. And we brief groups on where to go when there is no toilet, which is an unglamorous conversation that saves a water source.

The park you are walking in, and why it is protected, is on the page about what Everest Base Camp actually is. What you should and should not carry up there in the first place is on the Everest Base Camp packing list.

Every operator has a complaints process on paper and most of them are a form that goes nowhere. Ours is deliberately small, because a small process that a person actually runs is worth more than a large one nobody reads.

On the trail, tell the guide the same day. Food, a room, the pace, another member of the group, anything. Most of what becomes a complaint afterwards was fixable on the day it happened, and a guide who does not know cannot fix it. If it is about the guide, the office number works from the trail wherever there is signal.

Afterwards, put it in writing. Send it through the contact page. You get an acknowledgement with a named person on it, not a ticket number, and a written answer rather than a phone call, so that you have something you can keep and quote back.

What we do with it. If we were wrong we say so in the reply, in plain words, without the sentence that starts by being sorry that you feel something. If it was about a number we published, the correction goes in the corrections log on our editorial and corrections policy and the page carries the date it changed. If it was about how a trip was run, it changes the briefing for the next one.

The standing offer, and it is not rhetorical. If anything on this page is not what happened on your trip, write to us and say so. A commitments page that never gets tested is just a longer advertisement, and the only thing that makes this one worth reading is that you can hold it up afterwards.

Every number above is listed here with the body that publishes it and the date we last read it. If a figure has changed since, write to us and we will correct the page and say that we did.