The one genuinely awkward thing about getting to Everest from Oman
I write one of these pages for every market we sell to, and I always lead with whatever is hardest about that particular country. From Kuwait almost nothing is hard. From Oman one thing is, and I would rather you heard it from me now than found it out halfway through a booking page.
There is no direct flight from Muscat to Kathmandu. Not with Oman Air, not with SalamAir, not with anybody. Oman Air did fly the route once and dropped it years ago. Every way of getting from Oman to Nepal today involves one stop.
I am being blunt about this because the internet will tell you otherwise. Booking sites generate a page for any two cities you type in, and several of them cheerfully advertise direct Muscat to Kathmandu flights that do not exist. One of the big ones shows a genuine nonstop on that page, except that the nonstop is Muscat to Delhi, which is the first half of a connection. If you plan around that you will build an itinerary on a flight nobody operates.
The good news is that the connection is short and there are many of them, and I will give you the real routings further down. Our twelve-day Everest Base Camp trek is the package every number on this page is built on, and if you would rather just ask me, my WhatsApp is at the bottom and I answer it myself.
What does the trek itself cost?
Our Everest Base Camp trek runs twelve days, Kathmandu to Kathmandu, in three tiers. Budget is US$1,399, which is OMR 538. Standard is US$2,499, which is OMR 961. Luxury is US$4,999, which is OMR 1,922.
Those prices hold for 2027 departures as well as 2026. We decided that deliberately. Our own costs will rise next year and our margin will absorb the difference, because I would rather you booked early against a number you can trust than played a guessing game with next season's list. The one exception across our whole range is Kailash and Tibet, which we cannot price until our partners on the Chinese side confirm their 2027 rates.
The tiers are not marketing language. Budget means you carry your own bag and buy your own meals. Standard means one porter shared between two trekkers, every meal included, and a private room. Luxury means a porter each, the better lodges, and a helicopter in and out of Lukla instead of the fixed-wing flight. The gap between budget and standard is mostly food and a porter, and for most people standard is the honest recommendation.
One thing sits outside all three numbers, ours and anybody else's worth trusting: hotels in Kathmandu. Trek packages start when you leave the city and end when you come back to it. An operator who folds the hotel into the headline price is either charging you for it somewhere else or putting you somewhere you would not have chosen.
The short answer, all in
A standard twelve-day trek from Oman, everything included, lands at about OMR 1,530. That is roughly US$3,985. Budget comes in near OMR 1,050 and luxury near OMR 2,500. The line-by-line table is further down, and every figure in it is one you can check.
If a quote lands well below the bottom of that range for the same twelve days, something has been taken out. Usually it is a guide's wage, an acclimatisation day, or the insurance the company should be carrying on its own staff.
The rial is a hard peg, and that works in your favour
This is the opposite of the situation my clients in Kuwait face, and it is worth thirty seconds of your time. The Central Bank of Oman has held the rial at US$2.6008 since 1986. It is a fixed peg, not a managed basket, and the parity has not moved in forty years.
What that means practically is that the rial column on this page is as stable as the dollar column. Our prices are set in dollars, you are reading them in rials at 0.3845 to the dollar, and neither figure is going to drift while you make up your mind. My clients in Kuwait have to watch a currency that moves against an undisclosed basket. You do not.
How much are the flights, really?
Here are the routings that actually exist, all of them one stop.
Through Delhi is usually the quickest on paper, with Oman Air, IndiGo or Air India. Through Abu Dhabi works well because Air Arabia flies Abu Dhabi to Kathmandu directly. Through Sharjah is often the cheapest of the lot, because SalamAir will get you to Sharjah and Air Arabia flies Sharjah to Kathmandu. Dubai and Doha both work too, since flydubai, Himalaya Airlines, Nepal Airlines and Qatar Airways all fly nonstop into Kathmandu from there. Mumbai is a fourth option if the timings suit.
Total journey times vary more than you would expect. A well-timed connection gets you there in about seven and three quarter hours. A badly timed one takes thirteen, and the worst I have seen is over twenty. The difference is almost entirely the length of the layover, so this is a case where booking the cheapest ticket can cost you most of a day at each end.
On fares, I will give you a band rather than one number, because fares move weekly and a page quoting a single figure is wrong by the time you read it. One-way tickets in the September and October window have been running from about US$210 to US$495, so a return generally lands somewhere around OMR 150 to OMR 290. October is the peak month and the fares know it, so book that month early.
One practical note. Because you are connecting rather than flying direct, your bag has one more chance to go missing than a Kuwait or Doha passenger's does. Put your boots, your prescription medicines and one set of thermals in your cabin bag. Everything else we can replace in Kathmandu in a morning, but boots you have broken in, you cannot.
Is Gulf airspace a problem for these flights?
It is a fair question in 2026 and I am not going to skip it. The European aviation safety agency has a conflict zone bulletin in force covering the airspace of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, currently running to the end of September 2026, alongside separate bulletins for Iran and Iraq. Oman itself and the Muscat flight region are not named individually in any of them.
In practice Muscat is operating normally and our clients have been flying in and out all season. My advice is what it would be in any uncertain period, and it matters slightly more for you than for a direct-flight passenger. Build one spare day into your plan before the trek starts, and do not book a connection with less than three hours in it. If a flight is cancelled you then have a buffer rather than a crisis. That spare day doubles as your Lukla weather day, so it costs you nothing you were not already spending.
Visa, permits and insurance
Your visa depends on your passport, not on your Omani residency, and in Oman that distinction matters more than almost anywhere else I write for, because so many of my readers here are Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan nationals living and working in the Sultanate.
If you hold a passport from a SAARC country, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan is the one exception, you get up to thirty days free on your first visit in a given visa year. No fee at all. Everyone else pays on arrival at Kathmandu airport: US$30 for fifteen days, US$50 for thirty days, US$125 for ninety days. Thirty days is what almost everyone needs, and that is about OMR 19. You can fill the arrival form online before you fly and skip the kiosk queue, and the visa on arrival guide walks through it. If you are not sure whether your passport qualifies for arrival issue, ask me before you book flights rather than after.
Two permits are needed for this trek. The Sagarmatha National Park permit is NPR 3,000, about OMR 7.5, and holders of SAARC passports pay half. The Khumbu Pasang Lhamu municipality permit is NPR 2,000, about OMR 5. On any decent package, ours included, both are bought for you and sit inside the price. I list them so you can see where the money goes.
Insurance is the one item you must buy yourself and the one item not to economise on. Your Omani employer's health plan almost certainly excludes adventure activity abroad and will pay nothing towards a helicopter, and a helicopter from Gorak Shep to Kathmandu is billed in thousands of dollars. Buy a policy that names trekking to 6,000 metres in the wording. It has to be higher than Kala Patthar at 5,545 metres, not equal to it, because a rescue helicopter has to be able to fly above you to reach you. Many policies sold in the Gulf stop at 3,000 or 4,000 metres unless you add the adventure rider, and some exclude helicopter evacuation outright, so read the exclusions and not the brochure. Budget OMR 40 to 90 for two to three weeks. Send me the wording before you fly and I will tell you honestly whether it has a hole in it.
You already train on mountains, and that changes the advice
Most of the Gulf pages I write have to answer the question of how you train for a high pass in a country with no hills. From Kuwait the highest ground is around 300 metres. From Qatar it is about 100. I have to tell those readers to walk up and down the stairs in their building.
Oman is the exception, and you know it better than I do. Jebel Shams is the highest mountain in the country, and the Ministry of Tourism puts it at 3,009 metres. The northern summit is a military site and closed, but the southern summit is open and marked, and the Saiq Plateau up on Jebel Akhdar sits at around 2,000 metres. There is a marked trail network through the Hajar mountains, graded and signed, and a real domestic hiking scene that uses it. The Nepali community in Muscat is part of that scene: the embassy organised a group hike from Riyam Park up to Muttrah Fort in May 2025 and forty-six people turned out for it.
So my advice to you is different from my advice to a reader in Doha. You do not need me to invent a training substitute. You need to use what is already an hour or two from your door, and to use it the right way.
What Jebel Shams does not prepare you for
Two things, and being honest about them is more useful than flattery.
The first is altitude. Your highest available ground is around 3,000 metres and the summit above it is closed, so there is no way to train inside Oman above roughly that height. Kala Patthar is 5,545. That is not a criticism of your fitness, it is arithmetic, and it is the reason our itinerary builds in acclimatisation days rather than leaving the problem to how strong you are. Altitude tolerance is mostly genetic and mostly unknowable until you are up there. Nobody finds out on a day trip in the Hajar range.
The second is consecutive days. A hard day on the Balcony Walk or up to the southern summit is one hard day, and then you drive home and sleep in your own bed. This trek is five to seven hours a day for twelve days in a row, at a pace that will feel insultingly gentle for the first three. What breaks people is not the thin air, it is day nine, six hours of descent, on knees that have already done eight days.
So train descent, and train repetition. Go down Jebel Shams as deliberately as you go up it, and do not treat the downhill as the easy part. Put two long walking days back to back on a weekend rather than one enormous one. Carry ten kilos while you do it. And if you can get up to the Saiq Plateau and sleep there before a big walking day, do that, because a night at 2,000 metres teaches your body something a day trip does not.
What no amount of training fixes is going too fast in the first week. That is a decision, not a fitness level, and your guide will be telling you to slow down while you still feel fine.
What will I spend on the trail?
On a standard or luxury package with meals included, trail spending is small: hot showers, which run NPR 500 to 800 higher up, wifi, battery charging, snacks, and the bakery stop in Namche that everybody makes. OMR 6 to 9 a day covers it comfortably. On the budget package you buy your own meals, and prices climb with altitude because everything above Namche arrives on a porter's back or a yak. Plan OMR 5 to 6 a day for three lodge meals and tea, so roughly OMR 60 to 70 across the trek.
Add two or three Kathmandu hotel nights. A clean tourist class double in Thamel runs about OMR 25 to 38 a night, and a five star runs OMR 60 and up, which by Omani standards is not much at all. Carry your trail money in Nepali rupees from Kathmandu. Rials change easily in Thamel and the Kathmandu cash machines are fine, but do not count on the trail, where the only machines are in Namche and they are often empty.
Halal food, prayer and Ramadan on the trail
The trail runs through Sherpa Buddhist villages, so there is no halal certification anywhere above Lukla and I will not pretend otherwise. What there is, in practice, is a menu that solves the problem by accident. Lodge food at altitude is overwhelmingly vegetarian: dal bhat, potatoes, noodles, soups, eggs, rice and vegetables. Most trekkers of every religion stop eating meat above Namche anyway, because it has been carried uphill unrefrigerated for two or three days. Your guide will tell you the same thing on day two.
Alcohol is not served in our lodges by arrangement and is a bad idea at altitude regardless. Prayer is straightforward: the lodges are quiet, the rooms are private on the standard tier, and nobody will remark on it. Bring a compass or an app that works offline, because the signal comes and goes above Namche.
On Ramadan, my honest advice is do not trek during it. Fasting through five hours of walking at altitude, when dehydration is already the main risk factor for altitude sickness, is genuinely dangerous rather than merely hard. Trek before it or after it. There is a detail in the 2027 calendar worth planning around and I have put it in the leave section below.
How much should I tip?
Tipping matters more here than on an ordinary holiday, and it matters to a crew who may well have a relative working in Oman. Somewhere around twenty-one thousand Nepali nationals live and work in the Sultanate, and our own government's more recent estimate puts it above twenty-five thousand. A good share of them are in construction, healthcare and domestic work. You already know what the rial buys and what it is worth to a family in Nepal, which puts you ahead of most of my clients.
A fair guideline is about ten per cent of the trek price, pooled. For a standard trek, think OMR 55 to 75 for the guide and OMR 40 to 55 for the porter, adjusted for group size and how well the team looked after you. Hand it over on the last trekking day, in rupees or dollars.
The full arithmetic, from Oman
Standard package, one trekker sharing rooms:
| Item | OMR | USD |
|---|---|---|
| Trek package, standard tier | 961 | 2,499 |
| Return flights to Kathmandu, one stop | 200 | 520 |
| Nepal visa, 30 days | 19 | 50 |
| Insurance with 6,000 m cover | 58 | 150 |
| 3 Kathmandu hotel nights | 94 | 245 |
| Trail extras, 12 days | 85 | 220 |
| Tips for guide and porter | 115 | 300 |
| Total | about 1,530 | about 3,985 |
The same arithmetic puts the budget route at about OMR 1,050, once you add roughly OMR 65 of trail meals and tip the guide alone, and the luxury route at about OMR 2,500. The fuller breakdown of what sits underneath every operator's pricing is in what Everest Base Camp really costs, and if you are weighing the cheapest way to do it properly, the budget guide is the honest version.
Does it get cheaper as a group?
Yes, and the discount is by group size only, never by whether you book privately. Our price is the same either way, because we never add strangers to your group. On the standard tier, one to four trekkers pay US$2,499 each, five to eight pay US$2,449, nine to twelve pay US$2,399, and thirteen to twenty pay US$2,349. In rials that is OMR 961 down to OMR 903.
The budget tier moves much further, from US$1,399 for one to four down to US$999 at thirteen or more, which is OMR 538 down to OMR 384. If you are pulling a group together from an Omani company, a hiking group or a community association, the budget tier at scale is where the real saving sits. Send me a number of people and I will send you the exact figure rather than a band.
How many days off do I need, and when?
Sixteen is the honest answer from Oman. Twelve for the trek, a travel day at each end, one spare day for Lukla weather, and realistically one more than a Kuwait client needs because you are connecting rather than flying direct.
Oman's labour law is generous enough to absorb that. Under the 2023 labour law an employee is entitled to thirty days of paid annual leave, available once you have been six months in the job. This trek takes about half of that for the biggest thing most people ever walk.
Now the calendar. For 2026 the National Day holiday falls on 25 and 26 November, a Wednesday and a Thursday, and that is unusually good news, because late November is genuinely one of the better times to be on this trail. It is colder, much quieter and often clearer than October. If your weekend runs Friday and Saturday, those two days plus the weekend give you a four-day block to build leave around.
For 2027 I would plan around Eid al-Fitr. Ramadan is expected to begin around 8 February 2027 and Eid al-Fitr to fall around 9 or 10 March, though Oman sights the moon independently and the date can move by a day. That window opens directly into the spring trekking season, with the weather warming and the rhododendrons out in the weeks that follow. Eid al-Adha is expected around 16 or 17 May 2027, which is late for spring and close to the monsoon, so I would not build a Base Camp trek around it. Oman publishes its official holiday calendar late in the preceding year, so the 2027 National Day dates are not confirmed yet and I am not going to guess at them here.
When should I go, in 2026 or 2027?
October is the most reliable month and the busiest, in both years. Know one thing most sites will not tell you: from late September to the end of November, Lukla flights leave from Manthali airstrip, four to five hours by road from Kathmandu, with a pickup at one or two in the morning. We tell every client this before they book, because finding out at hotel reception the night before is not a good start. Helicopters are exempt and fly Kathmandu to Lukla direct all year.
Mid-November into early December is quieter, colder and often better value, and that holds for December 2026 and December 2027 alike. It is also where your National Day block sits in 2026. Late March into April is the warm alternative with the rhododendrons out, and in 2027 it pairs neatly with the Eid al-Fitr window. Two recent autumns have seen the tail of a Bay of Bengal cyclone clip the last week of October, so if your dates are flexible, the first half of November has become my honest recommendation for both seasons. The month-by-month guide covers what each one actually feels like.
Which Everest trek should an Oman-based trekker book?
If you have sixteen days, the twelve-day Everest Base Camp trek is the right one and the one this page prices. With thirty days of annual leave you also have room for the options many of my clients cannot consider: the Gokyo lakes added on, or the three passes, which turns it into a much bigger trip. Ask me and I will tell you which one suits the time you actually have.
If your leave is genuinely capped at ten days, do not squeeze this trek, because the days you would cut are the acclimatisation days and that is the part keeping you safe. If the budget stretches and the time does not, the Everest helicopter tour puts you at Kala Patthar and back in a morning. It is a different experience from walking there and I would not pretend otherwise, but for someone with four days in Nepal it is a real option rather than a consolation.
How do I pay from Oman?
Ten per cent confirms the booking and holds your guide and your Lukla seats. The balance is paid in Kathmandu.
Paying from Oman is more straightforward than from some of its neighbours. The national Maal card runs on the domestic OmanNet network and is designed for use inside the country, so it is not the one to reach for on an international checkout. The Visa and Mastercard debit and credit cards that Omani banks issue alongside it work normally on international payment pages, usually with a one-time password step. Use one of those. If a payment is refused, message me rather than trying it repeatedly, because repeated attempts are what triggers a block.
If you pay the balance by card there is a 3.5 per cent charge, which is the gateway's and not ours. Cash in Kathmandu carries none, and plenty of clients bring dollars and settle at the briefing.
Be clear on the terms before you pay. The deposit is not refundable and we do not offer free cancellation. What we do offer is free rescheduling, to any date within a year, with seventy-two hours notice. If we are the ones who cancel, you are refunded less the bank and card charges and the tax on them, and if you paid cash you are refunded in full. I would rather write that plainly here than have you discover it on a terms page.
Check us before you pay
You are sending money from Oman to a company in Kathmandu you have never visited, and you should verify us before you do. We are The Everest Holiday Pvt. Ltd., registered in Kathmandu on 8 April 2016, company registration 147653/072/073, trekking licence 2090/072, and TAAN member number 1586. Every one of those is checkable against a public register, and I will send scans on request.
Ask every operator you are comparing for the same four things. Then ask for something the paperwork cannot give you: get them on a video call. I should be honest that registration proves a company is legitimate, it does not prove it is good, and fully licensed operators in Nepal have been involved in bad episodes. Ten minutes on a call tells you more about who will look after you at 5,000 metres than any certificate will.
The questions Oman clients always ask me
Is the water safe? Boiled water is included on the standard tier, two litres a day, and it is the right answer both for your stomach and for the mountain, which does not need another few hundred plastic bottles. Do not drink from streams, however clean they look.
Will my phone work? A local SIM is arranged for you on arrival on the standard tier. Data is unreliable above Namche. Lodges sell wifi by the day. Tell your family in advance that two silent days are normal and not a cause for alarm.
Can my teenager come? Yes, and Gulf families do this trek. The limiting factor is not age but the willingness to walk slowly for twelve days. The youngest client we have taken to Base Camp was eleven.
Is it harder than Jebel Shams? Individually, no. Any day on this trek is within reach of someone who walks the Hajar trails regularly. It is the twelve days in a row and the altitude that make it a different thing, not the steepness of any one morning.
What if I cannot make it? Then you turn round, and it is not a failure. Your guide has the authority to send any one of you down without asking me first, and I back that decision every time. Descent is the treatment for altitude sickness and there is no other one.
Is Nepal safe right now? Yes for the Everest region, which has been running normally all season. Conditions elsewhere in the country change with the weather and I will tell you before you book if anything affects your route.
If you want the same arithmetic in dinars, riyals or dirhams for a colleague, the Kuwait version, the Qatar version, the Saudi version and the UAE version of this page work the same way.
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Written by Shreejan Simkhada, CEO of The Everest Holiday and third-generation Himalayan guide. TAAN Member #1586.
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