Our licenses and registrations, and how to check each one

Here is the whole set on one screen. Each line is explained underneath, in plain words, with what it means for you rather than what it means to a regulator. We guide the walk to Everest Base Camp ourselves, so these are our own documents and not a partner’s.

Registered office: 16 Sorhakhutte, Thamel, Kathmandu. One phone number, +977 9851023285, for calls and messaging. Trading name Nepal Unique Treks. Every number on this page was last checked on 12 September 2026, and the sources are listed at the foot of the page.

Nepal Unique Treks and Expedition Pvt Ltd was registered on 21 October 2014 and carries registration number 125964/071/072. That number is filed with the trekking association, which publishes it on our member record1, so it is not a number you have to take from us.

What it means for you. The business you would be paying is a registered limited company with a number attached to it, not a person with a bank account and a website. A registered company can be looked up, has filings to keep, and has something to lose if it treats you badly. That is the whole value of a registration number, and it is worth exactly nothing if the company will not give you the number.

The correction we carry. Our founder is Dil Bahadur Gurung, and the association record names him as the company’s key person. He has guided in Nepal since 2004. The company is younger than his career, and those two dates stay separate everywhere on this site. You will see operators in this market attach a founder’s career years to the business itself. We do not, because the honest version is easy to check and the rounded up version is not. Why this site exists alongside the operating company is the story. This page is only the paperwork.

The number we retired. An older registration number still appears in the header of our operating company’s own website. It does not match the number the association has on file for us. We publish the association filed number, because a third party publishes it too, and the older one is being removed. We do not reprint it here. Repeating a number nobody can stand behind is how a wrong number spreads, and every correction we make is logged under our editorial and corrections policy.

Our tourism license number is 1632, issued by the Department of Tourism of the Government of Nepal. It is the license a trekking agency holds in order to operate as one. The document itself is published as a scan on our operating company’s legal documents page2.

What it means for you. An operator without this is selling you something it is not licensed to sell. That is the floor, not the ceiling. A license says the government recognizes the business as a trekking agency. It says nothing about how the company runs a route, how it treats porters, or whether it will get you down safely if you get sick. How we actually run the trek is a separate question, and a separate page.

The honest limit on this one. This is the weakest line in the table, and we would rather say so than let it sit there looking like the others. We could not find a public database where you type this number in and see us come back. It is a number we assert, backed by a document scan we host. The strength it does have is indirect: the association admitted us as a member with our documents attached, and it publishes its own copies of several of them. If you want a stronger version of this check, ask us for the document by email and compare it against the association’s copy.

We are member number 2291 of the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal, which most people write as TAAN. It is the trade body that trekking agencies in Nepal belong to. It holds copies of a member’s registration documents and publishes a member record for each one. Open our member record on the association register.

What it means for you. This is the only credential in the set you can verify on a website we do not control, and it takes about a minute. The record shows our company registration number and our VAT number. Compare them, character for character, with the table above. If a number on our site did not match the number on theirs, that would be the end of the conversation, and you should treat any operator that way.

The same record names our founder as the company’s key person, so the name on this site and the name on the register are the same human being. We name 10 of our people in total, each with a role, and the ones who walk the route with you are on the guides page.

What membership is not. It is not a quality rating and not an inspection. The association does not audit our itineraries or walk behind our guides. Membership means we are a registered agency in good standing with a body that holds our paperwork. Treat it as proof of identity, which is what it is, and not as proof of care.

Our VAT number is 602410649, and it is published on the same association member record as the company registration1. VAT means value added tax. A business that is registered for it gets a number and has to file returns against that number.

What it means for you. Two practical things. You can be given a proper tax invoice for what you pay, which matters if you are claiming a trip against a business or a grant. And the money goes to a company the tax authority already knows about, rather than into an arrangement that exists only as long as the website does. An operator with no VAT number is either very small or invisible to the tax system, and either way that is something to know before you send a deposit.

Our operating company publishes 17 document images on its legal documents page2. They include the tourism department registration, the company registration, the permanent account number, the foreign exchange license, the association certificate and the trekking guide licenses.

Not all of them are licenses. Some of those images are letters of appreciation and award certificates. A letter of thanks proves nothing about whether a company is allowed to operate, so we do not count them as credentials and they do not appear in the table on this page. A credentials page that pads its own count is doing the opposite of what a credentials page is for.

Why a scan is weak on its own. A number inside a photograph of a certificate cannot be searched, cannot be copied, and cannot be read by anything except a person squinting at it. It is evidence for a human and invisible to a machine. That is exactly why this page exists: the numbers are typed out here in text you can select, search and compare.

The part that carries real weight. The association hosts its own copies of several of the same documents on our member record1. A document sitting on somebody else’s server, uploaded when they checked us, is worth more than the same document sitting on ours. When you check an operator, that is the difference to look for.

Trekking websites carry rows of association logos, and readers have no way to tell which of them mean anything. So we have split ours into two groups and told you which group each one is in.

Proven, with a member record. The Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal, member 2291. There is a page with our number on it, on their website, and you can open it from this page.

Stated, with no member record we could find. We are associated with the bodies below, and their badges appear on our operating company’s site. None of them publishes a member record carrying our number, and for some of them we could not find a membership number anywhere at all. So they are listed here as associations we state, not credentials we can prove:

• Nepal Tourism Board (NTB). Their website, which is the organization’s own page and not a record about us.
• Nepal Mountaineering Association (NMA). Their website, which is the organization’s own page and not a record about us.
• Kathmandu Environmental Education Project (KEEP). Their website, which is the organization’s own page and not a record about us.
• Village Tourism Promotion Forum Nepal (VITOF). Their website, which is the organization’s own page and not a record about us.
• Gurung Tourism Entrepreneurs' Association Nepal (GTEAN). Their website, which is the organization’s own page and not a record about us.

What it means for you. A logo is the cheapest thing on any trekking website. Anybody can paste one. The question worth asking an operator is not which bodies they belong to, but which of those bodies publishes a page with their number on it. Usually the answer is none, and the answer arrives slowly. How to check any Everest Base Camp operator turns that into a short list of questions you can send to anyone.

Travelers have rated the operating company 5.0 out of 5 from 104 reviews on TripAdvisor3, read on 12 September 2026. Read them on TripAdvisor rather than taking the figure from us.

On that same profile we rank 425 of 2,623 outdoor activities in Kathmandu. That is not a flattering number and it sits on the page we just sent you to. Quoting the rating and hiding the rank would be the normal move here, which is reason enough not to make it.

Why there is no star graphic on this page. Those reviews were collected by TripAdvisor, about the company across every trek it runs, not about anything on this website. So we cite them in words with a link, and we put no review count and no rating into this page’s structured data, where you could not see it. We display no award badges either. A badge is an image, an image can say any number at all, and several of the ones in circulation in this market do.

This takes a few minutes and it costs us nothing, which is the point. Do it to us first, then do it to every other operator on your shortlist. The comparison is more useful than anything either of us writes about ourselves.

• Start with the association record. Open member 2291 on the association register and compare the company registration number and the VAT number against the table at the top of this page. They should match exactly.
• Look at who hosts the documents. Several of our document scans are on the association’s own server, not ours. Click one. A document an outside body uploaded when it checked a company is stronger evidence than the same image on the company’s own site.
• Check the name and the address in Google. Google holds a record of the business under the identifier /g/11b6z60wx_4. Open Google’s record of the company and compare the address with 16 Sorhakhutte, Thamel, Kathmandu. The association record files our country but no street address, so Google is the corroboration for that line, not the association.
• Read the reviews at the source. Not the quotes on our site. The profile itself, including the rank and the replies posted under the company’s own management account.
• Call the number and ask for the founder by name. The association record names him. One phone number, +977 9851023285, answers voice and messaging. An operator who cannot connect you to the named person on their own register is telling you something.
• Then ask everyone else the same three questions. What is your registration number, where is it published by somebody other than you, and who issued your tourism license. Note how long each answer takes to arrive.

If any line on this page does not match what you find, tell us and we will correct the page and say on it that we did. That is the same promise as our editorial and corrections policy, applied to our own paperwork.

A credentials page that lists only strengths is an advertisement. Here is what is missing from this one, and the reason in each case.

• Individual guide license numbers. Trekking guide license scans exist, and the numbers are inside the images. Nobody has transcribed the numbers yet, and we will not publish a license number we have not read off the document ourselves. Ask us before you travel and we will confirm the license of the guide assigned to you. Our guides’ profiles are on the page about our guides.
• Wilderness first aid certificates. Our association profile states that our guides are wilderness first aid certified. That is our own copy on somebody else’s website, not a certificate, so it is not a credential and we are not counting it as one here. When we hold a certificate per person, each one gets published against that person’s name.
• A liability insurance certificate. We do not publish one. We are not going to imply cover we cannot show you a document for. If insurance is part of your decision, ask us in writing through the contact page and you will get an answer in writing that you can keep.
• Membership numbers for the stated affiliations. We could find no membership number for the Nepal Mountaineering Association or the Nepal Tourism Board anywhere, on their sites or ours. Rather than drop the affiliation quietly or dress it up as verified, we label it as stated and leave it visible.
• Our bank account number. The SWIFT code is in the table, because it is checkable and it names the bank. The account number is not, and it never will be on a public page. It goes to you with your invoice, from us. If bank details for a Nepal trek reach you any other way, including a message that appears to come from us, stop and call the number on this page first.

Each of these gaps is real work rather than a policy, and the list gets shorter as we close them. When one closes, it appears here with the date, the same way a correction does.

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.