Which company should you trek to Everest Base Camp with?

Run these in order. The first three are the ones that matter most, and the ninth is the cheapest test available to you. Each one links to the section below that explains what a good answer looks like and what a bad answer looks like.

1. Is the company a licensed operator in Nepal, and can you check that somewhere the company does not control?
2. Is the guide registered, and will they give you a name before you pay?
3. Does the itinerary keep its acclimatization days? A trip that drops one to look cheaper or faster is the one real red flag.
4. Is every inclusion written down? A verbal inclusion is not an inclusion.
5. Does the operator tell you what insurance you need, and ask to see it?
6. What happens if the Lukla flight does not go, and who pays for the extra nights?
7. How many people are in the group, and who is staffing it?
8. What happens to the porters, and how do you ask so that you get an answer rather than a slogan?
9. How does the company answer one hard question by email?
10. Is the deposit and the cancellation policy in writing before you pay?

A trekking company in Nepal is a registered business with a government tourism license. Plenty of websites that sell this trek are none of those things. The check that matters is not whether a company says it is licensed. It is whether anybody other than the company says so.

Ask for three numbers. The company registration number, the VAT number, and the tourism license number. A real operator has all three and hands them over without a pause. Then ask the question that actually does the work: where are these published by somebody who is not you?

The association register is the strongest free check. The Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal publishes a member record for each of its members, on its own server, with the company registration number and the VAT number on it. Anyone can open it. If an operator gives you a member number, open the record and compare every digit against what they told you. Ours is member 22911 and you can open it on the association register without asking us.

Know what the tourism license does not prove. The government tourism license number is the one credential we have not found published on any third party site, ours included. So treat it the way we treat ours: as a number the company asserts, backed by a document scan you can ask to see, and not as something an outside body has confirmed for you. An operator who tells you a tourism license is independently searchable online is overstating it.

Look at who is hosting the documents. A scan of a certificate on the company website is an image the company uploaded. The same scan on an association server is an image an outside body uploaded after checking the company. Those are not equally strong, and the difference costs you one click to find out.

The red flag here is vagueness, not a missing number. Small operators sometimes have to dig out a document. That is fine. What is not fine is an operator who answers a question about registration with a paragraph about how long they have been in business. That answer is a decision to change the subject.

The company sells you the trek. A person walks it with you, makes the decisions at altitude, and is the one who matters when something goes wrong. Those are two different things to check and most buyers only check the first.

Start with the rule, because it is settled. Nepal has required trekkers to be accompanied by a registered guide since 1 April 20232. A registered guide is a person the state holds a record of. It is not a friend who has been before, and it is not a porter, who carries your bag and is not registered to lead you. Whether that national rule reaches inside the Khumbu is argued about by two authorities, and we set out both positions on the page about trekking to Everest Base Camp without a guide.

Ask for a name before you pay, not after. A company that staffs its own departures can usually tell you who is likely to lead yours, or at worst give you a short list of the people who do. A company that cannot name anybody at all, at any point, is probably going to buy your trek from somebody else after you have paid.

Ask what the guide holds, and listen for the difference between held and claimed. A guide license is a document. Wilderness first aid training is a separate certificate with a name and an expiry. An operator saying that its guides are first aid trained is a claim. An operator that can tell you which certificate, issued by whom, and when it was last renewed, is describing a document. Both answers sound the same in an advertisement and they are not the same thing.

Ask how many seasons that person has worked this route. Not how many years in the industry. This route, in the seasons you are considering. The Khumbu in April is a different job from the Khumbu in November, and a guide who has only worked one of them will tell you so honestly if you ask directly.

If you only run one check on this page, run this one. Acclimatization means letting your body get used to less oxygen before you climb higher, and the way it is done on this route is by spending extra nights at two particular heights instead of walking straight through. A trip that removes one of those nights looks cheaper and faster on a comparison table, and it is the only thing on this list where the saving comes directly out of your safety.

What you are looking for in the itinerary. Two extra nights that do not move you forward. 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 walk up to a higher point and come back down to sleep, which is the whole mechanism. They are not rest days in the sense of lying in bed, and an itinerary that describes them as free days is describing them wrong.

How a dropped day is disguised. It is rarely announced. It shows up as a shorter trip at a lower price, or as a day described as flexible, or as two walking days quietly merged into one. So do not read the marketing summary. Open the day by day list and count the nights by the place name. Our full day by day version, with the height you sleep at each night, is the page on the Everest Base Camp itinerary day by day.

Ask one question and the answer tells you everything. Ask: what happens if somebody in the group is not doing well on the acclimatization day? An operator who runs this route properly will describe a decision, usually about stopping or going down. An operator who tells you that it never happens is either new or is telling you what they think closes the sale.

Why this one is different from the rest of the list. Every other item here is about money, paperwork or comfort, and getting one of them wrong costs you a bad experience. This one is about the only part of the trip that can actually hurt you. What the symptoms are and what those days do is on the page about altitude sickness on the Everest Base Camp trek, and what the real risks on this route are, in proportion, is on the page about how dangerous the Everest Base Camp trek is.

Almost every complaint about a trek in Nepal is a disagreement about what was included. Almost every one of those started with somebody being told something on a call and never seeing it written down. The fix costs nothing and takes one email.

Ask for the inclusions and the exclusions as a written list, in the same document. Not the inclusions alone. The exclusions are the half that tells you what the trip really costs, and an operator who publishes a long inclusion list and a short exclusion list is usually hiding the difference in the gap between them.

The lines people get caught by. Both trekking permits. The domestic flights in both directions. Airport transfers. Nights in Kathmandu before and after, and how many. Meals, and whether that means all meals or just some. Hot showers, device charging and wifi in the lodges, which are usually paid for separately on the trail and add up. The guide and porter tips, which are customary and are not usually in the price. Your travel insurance, which is yours.

Then ask what happens if the trip runs a day long. Who pays for the extra lodge night, the extra meals and the extra guide day. This is the single most common surprise on this route and it has a specific cause, which is the next check but one.

Get the answer in the thread, not on the phone. If an operator tells you something useful on a call, reply by email and write the sentence back to them: “Just to confirm what we discussed, this includes the following. Please confirm.” An operator who will not confirm in writing what they said out loud has told you something important.

You need travel insurance that covers helicopter evacuation from altitude. Not general travel insurance, and not a credit card policy you have never read. The part that matters is whether the policy covers being flown off this route, and from how high.

Ask what altitude your policy needs to cover. This trek finishes at 5,364 m (17,598 ft), so a policy with a trekking altitude limit below that does not cover the part of the trip you are actually buying. Any operator who has dealt with a real evacuation will name a height without hesitating. One who tells you to just get travel insurance has never had to read a policy exclusion to a family at midnight.

Ask whether the operator sells it. Most Nepali operators do not and cannot, which is normal and is not a criticism. What you want to know is that they will tell you what to buy, and that they will ask you for the policy number and the emergency phone line before you fly. An operator who never asks to see your insurance is not going to be the one holding it when you need it.

Read your own exclusions before you pay for anything. The common traps are an altitude ceiling, an exclusion for trekking above a stated height, a requirement that you are accompanied by a licensed guide, and a rule about who is allowed to authorize a helicopter. What most policies cover and what they leave out is on the page about travel insurance for the Everest Base Camp trek.

The small aircraft that serve Lukla (2,860 m (9,383 ft)) do not fly in poor visibility. Flights get delayed and canceled, in both directions, in every season. This is ordinary and it is not anybody’s fault, which is exactly why the question to ask is not whether it happens but what the company does when it does.

Ask the outbound version first. If you are stuck in Kathmandu on day one, who pays for the extra hotel night and the extra meals, what happens to your itinerary, and at what point does the trip get shortened or rerouted rather than delayed. An operator with a real answer will describe a sequence of decisions by day. An operator without one will say it rarely happens.

Then ask the return version, because it is the one that costs you money. If you are stuck in Lukla at the end, who pays for the extra lodge nights, and what happens to your international flight home. This is the scenario people get caught by, and the reason that a spare day at the end of a trip to this region is not padding.

Ask about the helicopter option in the same breath. When fixed wing flights stop, people charter helicopters out. Ask who arranges it, who decides, and who pays. We are not printing a charter figure on this page, because the number that exists in our own material has not been verified to the standard the rest of this site holds, and a cost you might have to find at short notice is the last place to publish a guess.

Ask which airport you are flying from. In the busy months these departures move out of Kathmandu to Manthali Airport at Ramechhap, which means a road transfer in the early hours before the flight. It changes your day, it sometimes changes the cost, and an operator who does not mention it until you arrive has not planned your trip. How the flight works, and where the diversion rule is still unsettled, is on the page about the Kathmandu to Lukla flight.

Group size is sold as a comfort feature and it is really a safety feature. One guide can watch a small group closely. The same guide with a large group cannot, and at altitude the whole job is noticing that one person is not right before that person notices it themselves.

Ask for the maximum, not the average. A company that answers with a typical group size is answering a different question. The number you want is the largest group they will run, because that is the group you might be in.

Then ask what gets added as the group grows. A second guide. An assistant. More porters. A company that adds nothing as the group doubles is selling you a thinner service at the same price, and a company that can tell you the threshold at which it adds a second person has thought about it.

Ask whether it is a private trip or a joined group. Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is finding out at the airport. If it is a joined group, ask how many are already booked and whether the departure runs if numbers stay low, because a trip that quietly gets canceled six weeks out is a worse outcome than a trip with ten people on it.

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. The sentence costs nothing to write, so the only useful questions are the ones that have a factual answer.

Ask the four questions that cannot be answered with a slogan. What is the maximum weight one porter carries, and who weighs it. Are the porters insured, and by whom. Who provides their jacket, boots and sleeping bag at the high stops, or do they provide their own. Where do they sleep, and is it a room or a dining room floor.

Listen for a number on the weight. An operator with a policy has a figure and applies it. An operator without one will say that it depends. It does depend, a little, on the stage and the load, but a company that has never fixed a ceiling has never had to enforce one.

Ask what happens if a porter gets ill. It happens, and porters are exposed to exactly the same altitude as you are, usually while carrying more and sometimes with worse equipment. The answer you want describes a person going down with somebody, not a shrug.

Now do the same to us. A load of 25 to 30 kg for one porter is common on this route. That figure describes the route, not us. Our own cap is 20 kg, adopted 13 September 2026, and over it we add another porter rather than put more on one back. We have not yet published our answers to the other three questions, on porter insurance, gear and where porters sleep, so ask us those in writing. What the two jobs involve is on the page about what a guide and a porter do on this trek.

This costs you five minutes and it tells you more than every review you will read. Pick one question with an uncomfortable answer, send it by email to three operators on your shortlist, and compare what comes back.

Questions that work. What happens if I have to turn around at Dingboche and the rest of the group carries on? What exactly is not included in this price? What is your deposit and what is your cancellation policy, in writing? Who pays for the extra nights if we are stuck in Lukla for two days? Can you tell me the name and the license status of the guide?

What you are grading. Not speed, because a company in Nepal is asleep while most of our readers are awake, and an instant reply is often a template. You are grading three things. Did they answer the question that was asked, or a nearby easier one. Did they give a specific answer or a reassuring one. And did they put anything in writing that they could later be held to.

The tell. An operator who answers a hard question with a concrete, slightly unflattering answer is showing you what the relationship will be like when something actually goes wrong. An operator who answers with enthusiasm and no facts is showing you that too.

Run it on us as well. Our address is on the contact page, one phone number answers voice and messaging, and you can send the awkward one straight to the trip inquiry form. Asking costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

You are about to send money to a company in another country for a trip that is months away. That is a perfectly normal thing to do and it is how this industry works. What is not normal is doing it without a written statement of what you owe, when, and what happens if you cannot come.

What a deposit statement should contain. The amount or the proportion. When the balance is due. What the deposit does if you postpone rather than cancel. Whether it is refundable at all, and under what conditions. All four, in a document, before you transfer anything.

What a cancellation policy should contain. A schedule, not a sentence. What you lose if you cancel six months out, one month out, one week out, and after the trip has started. If an operator has only one rule for every point in time, they have not written a policy, they have written a preference.

Check that the same figure appears everywhere on their site. This is the check almost nobody runs and it is the most revealing one on this page. Open the booking page and the terms page and compare them. Two different numbers on one company’s own website means nobody there has decided, and a company that has not decided its own deposit rate will be improvising when you need it to be precise.

Where the money goes. Payment should go to an account in the company’s registered name, and the details should come to you from the company, attached to an invoice. If bank details reach you any other way, including in a message that looks like it came from the operator, stop and call the number on their contact page before you send anything.

Read this part knowing what we are. everestbasecamp.tours is an entity of Nepal Unique Treks and Expedition Pvt Ltd, a licensed trekking company in Kathmandu. We are not an affiliate and we are not a reseller. We guide the walk to Everest Base Camp ourselves, and if you book a guided trek we would like it to be ours. That is a commercial interest and it points one way, which is the reason this page is a checklist you can use on anybody rather than a list of reasons to pick us.

Here is every check, run on us. We answer 6 of the ten in full, 3 in part, and 1 not at all yet. Where our answer is missing, ask us for it in writing, the same as you would ask anybody else.

Reviews, cited rather than badged. Our TripAdvisor profile shows 5.0 out of 5 from 104 reviews, read on 12 September 2026.3 We publish that as a sentence with a link to the profile, and we put no rating markup on any page of this site. Several higher review counts have appeared in our own older marketing. They were wrong, they are being removed, and the number above is the one on the live profile. Read the profile itself rather than our summary of it.

The same standard runs across 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 and leave the space empty rather than filling it with a number that reads well. How we decide that, and how to make us correct something, is on our editorial and corrections policy.

Many of the websites selling this trek do not run it. They sell it, take a margin, and hand you to a company in Kathmandu you never chose and cannot check. That is a legal and common business and it is not a scandal. It is just something you should know you are buying, because it changes every answer on this page.

How to tell. Ask one question: who employs the guide who will walk with me? A company that runs the trek answers with its own staff. A reseller answers with the name of another company, or does not answer. Then ask for the Nepali operating company’s registration number, and run check one on that company rather than on the website you are reading.

Why it matters when something goes wrong. With a reseller, the person deciding whether you go down a valley at two in the morning works for a company you have no contract with, and the company you do have a contract with is asleep on another continent. That chain works fine right up until the moment it is tested.

Where we sit, stated plainly. This site is a second site of one Kathmandu company rather than a separate business. The same legal entity holds the license, employs the guides, and answers the phone. If you find our parent company’s own site and notice that some of its published claims do not match what we publish here, that is not two companies disagreeing. It is one company correcting itself in public, and the corrections are logged on our editorial and corrections policy and explained on the page about who runs this.

The question “what is the best company for Everest” is really two questions with almost nothing in common. One is about a walk to base camp, which is what this page is about. The other is about climbing the mountain, which is a season of work, a different licensing regime and a different order of risk.

We do not sell summit expeditions, so we are not a candidate for the second question and we are not going to pretend otherwise in order to stay on the page. Nor will we recommend a specific expedition operator, because we have not audited any of them to the standard we are asking you to hold us to.

What we can do is explain what an expedition actually involves, what Nepal charges before any equipment is bought, and why the prerequisites take years, so that you can judge an expedition operator’s answers properly. That is on the page about what an Everest expedition involves, and why we do not sell it.

The final test of an operator is whether they will talk you out of something. It is the only question on this page where the right answer costs the company money, which is why the answer is worth so much.

Here are the cases where we tell people this trip is wrong for them, or wrong for now. When somebody has a heart or lung condition and has not spoken to their own doctor about altitude, we ask them to do that first and we wait. When the dates are too tight to keep both acclimatization days, we would rather move the dates than sell the shortened version. When somebody wants to see Everest but does not want to walk for days, the honest answer is a different product and sometimes it is not ours. And when somebody asks us to guarantee a summit view on a particular morning, we tell them that nobody can and that the weather does not negotiate.

How hard the walk actually is, in hours and consecutive days, is on the page about how difficult the Everest Base Camp trek really is. Read that before you read anybody’s sales page, including ours.

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.