Who you are actually dealing with

Soulful Nepal Holidays is a licensed trekking and tour operator based in Kathmandu. Not a booking platform, not a reseller, and not an office in another country subcontracting the work. The people who answer your first email are the people who arrange your permits, brief your guide and pick up the phone if something goes wrong at altitude.

Our guides have been leading in the Himalaya since the mid-nineties. That is thirty years of accumulated route knowledge, weather instinct and knowing which teahouse actually has a working stove in November, and it belongs to the people who walk with you rather than to the company logo.

What we believe about this

• The traveller should be able to check us. Registration number, ISO certificate, TAAN and NMA membership, VAT and PAN. All of it published, none of it decorative.
• The price should be arithmetic, not a negotiation. Permits, park fees and taxes are inside the figure. What is excluded is listed beside it rather than mentioned once you have paid.
• Nobody should be pushed. No countdown timers, no invented departure dates, no seat counters. If a route is wrong for your fitness or your dates we will say so and lose the booking.
• The mountain outranks the itinerary. Your guide can change the plan for weather, health or conditions, and that is the job working correctly rather than failing.

The people on the ground

Every trip is led by a government-licensed Nepali guide. Guides are paid properly, insured, and equipped, and porter loads are limited to what the law and decency allow. You are told your guide’s name and licence number before you travel, and you can talk to them before you arrive.

Founded by someone who did the trek first

Soulful Nepal Holidays was founded by Suman Dahal, who still runs the company today as Managing Director. He has been trekking and travelling since he was young, and reached Everest Base Camp himself in 1995, the trip that set the course for everything that followed. In the years since, he has built more than three decades of business experience in Nepal’s tourism industry, with firsthand trekking experience across the country’s different regions.

He started the company to do two things at once: build a business around work he actually cared about, and create a workplace for other trek and tour guides who love the outdoors the way he does. The goal has not changed since: bring more people closer to the nature, culture and adventure of hiking in the Himalaya, and help travellers who have had a trip on their list for years finally go and do it.