Nepal has thousands of registered trekking companies. Most of them can get you to Everest Base Camp and back. So the question is not whether you can find a company to take you into the Himalayas — it is whether the company you choose is actually accountable for what happens when you get there.
Here is what makes HAL different.
We have been here for eleven years
HAL began in 2014 with Annapurna Trail Race. Since then we have led expeditions across Nepal, Bhutan, Tajikistan, Tanzania and beyond. We have set the Fastest Known Time on the Manaslu Circuit. We have evacuated clients from Kanchenjunga. We have navigated permit bureaucracies at 5,000 metres in restricted areas that most operators have never heard of.
We are not a booking platform that subcontracts to local operators. Sudeep Kandel, HAL’s founder and director, is a licensed Nepal guide (Licence #14644) who has personally traversed most of the country on foot. When something goes wrong on a HAL trip, there is a named person who is responsible — and that person has been in these mountains for over a decade.
Our safety infrastructure — and why we built HOSI
HAL has operated with full safety infrastructure since day one in 2014. Every departure includes satellite communication, a remote high-altitude doctor on call, a custom weather forecast for passes above 5,000 metres, a Kathmandu backstopper, guide medical and heli-evacuation insurance, and a custom emergency protocol prepared before each trip.
In 2023 we took that infrastructure and made it available beyond our own clients. Every year Nepal loses trekkers and adventurers — the majority of them Nepali — who go into the mountains without any of this in place. Freelance guides working trip to trip have no access to remote medical support. Independent Nepali trekkers have no satellite communication and no emergency protocol if something goes wrong.
HOSI — the Himalayan Outdoor Safety Initiative — was built to change that. It provides safety orientation , a satellite device lending library and emergency protocol support to freelance Nepali guides and independent adventurers. Not as a commercial service. As a standard that the industry should have had all along.
The initiative was featured in The Guardian in 2023. We now also licence the HOSI safety framework to international operators who send clients to Nepal and need Nepal-side safety infrastructure they can trust.
Our guides own a stake in this company
In 2026 HAL became employee-owned. Through our Convertible Share Incentive Plan, our active guides are purchasing preferential shares in HAL. Through Nepal’s Social Security Fund, every team member has medical cover and a pension building in the background.
This is not a welfare initiative. It is a structural change in incentives. When a guide has equity in the company, their professional reputation and HAL’s commercial reputation are the same thing. That changes what decisions they make on the mountain — and it is the most direct answer we know to the structural problems in Nepal’s adventure tourism industry.
Srijan Ayer, Rishi Chudal, Anuj Dev Chudal and Upendra Sunuwar are long-term HAL guides who are becoming shareholders. They are not contractors hired trip by trip.
We keep groups small
Maximum ten people on every adventure departure. This is not a compromise — it is the entire point. Smaller groups move more carefully, acclimatise more thoughtfully, and have a fundamentally different experience than a twenty-person convoy. It also means our guides actually know who they are looking after.
We are all-inclusive — mostly
HAL trips cover everything from airport pickup to departure: accommodation on and off the trail, all meals on trail, internal flights and transport, permits, tips, guide wages and insurance, satellite communication, remote doctor, trip handbooks and GPX tracks.
What is not included: meals in Kathmandu outside the welcome and farewell dinners, and evacuation or early exit costs if you need to leave the trail. If you need to be evacuated, that cost falls to you and your travel insurance — which is exactly why we require comprehensive travel insurance that covers high-altitude adventures and emergency evacuation before every departure.
We price this way because we want you making decisions in the mountains based on what is right, not what is cheap. The safety call should never be a budget calculation.
We give back
Since 2022, HAL has awarded an annual research grant to a young Nepali undergraduate researcher working on tourism, conservation, sustainability or climate. The HAL Explorer Fund supports Nepali adventurers exploring their own country’s outdoors.
A note on price
We are not the cheapest way to adventure in Nepal. There are operators who will take you to Everest Base Camp for half what we charge. Some of them are good. Some are operating in the same commission-driven ecosystem that produced Nepal’s fake rescue scandal.
Our FAQs page includes a plain-English explanation of how we price our trips and what is included. If you are comparing quotes, read it before you decide.