Prices are set to increase on the Nepalese side, but it’s not known how much it’ll cost to go through Tibet. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
If you want to summit Everest, you’re going to have to shell out a bit more cash to do it. According to reports, the government of Nepal plans to increase Everest permit fees by a whopping 34 percent, which will raise the current price of $11,000 up to $15,000 per climber. That increase, however, won’t go into effect until 2025.
The prices for 2024 spring expeditions have already been written in, and as of this writing, the climbing teams are full. That means if you’re not already booked, you’re basically out of luck — at least if you’re going the traditional route from Nepal. It has, however, been announced that the Tibetan side of Everest will be open to foreign expeditions in 2024, although just how much it will cost climbers is not yet known.
“The CTMA (China Tibet Mountaineering Association) has not given us the permit rates for next year yet,” Dawa Steven Sherpa of Asian Trekking told ExplorersWeb. “This is making pricing and promoting the expedition in Tibet a challenge.”
It’s a little harder to go through Tibet, but perhaps not just from a physical standpoint.
“Unlike Nepal, where we can take advantage of flexible logistics and easy-to-obtain permits to do last-minute sign-ups,” Dawa Steven continued, “on Tibet expeditions we need to have all our documentation done months in advance because they close the permit applications at least one month in advance.”
This is making it tough for climbing outfits to lock down potential clients, since they don’t know exactly how much they’d be charging.
“We can only guess [at the price] looking at the past increases,” Lukas Furtenbach of Furtenbach Adventures told ExplorersWeb. “In our case, we have taken the full risk and kept the prices we had in 2019.”
In 2019, it cost somewhere around $15,000 to climb Everest. It’s likely that the rise in pricing is to combat the crowds. Everest is being swarmed each year, and all those climbers are leaving huge amounts of trash on the mountain.
There are some pretty ridiculous add ons you can get in your Everest package if you’ve got the money, like real beds and furniture in Base Camp tents, limitless O2 at any altitude, helicopter transfers from Base Camp to Kathmandu, and even shortcuts between Camp 2 and Base Camp.
