Why Belgian Trekkers Book Direct with a Nepali Family Company
One of the finest climbs ever made on the south side of Annapurna was led up by a Belgian. Ingrid Baeyens, from Antwerp, became the first woman to summit the South Face of Annapurna in October 1991, and the following spring she stood on top of Everest as the first Belgian woman to do it. Most Belgians who write to me have never heard of her. I mention it first because it says something true: Belgium is a low, flat country whose highest ground, the Signal de Botrange, is 694 metres, and yet Belgians have quietly been among the boldest people on these mountains for a long time. That is roughly how we like to work too, seriously and without much noise about it.
What almost nobody arrives with is a straight answer on what a trek actually costs in euros when you book it from Belgium. Most of what you find online is an agency in Brussels or Amsterdam reselling a Nepali operator like us with their margin added on top. We are the Nepali operator. The Everest Holiday is family run out of Kathmandu, registered here in 2016, and we are the people who run your trek on the ground, not a name on a website. Book direct and you pay our price, not our price plus somebody's commission. This guide gives you the real euro figures, how you actually fly here from Belgium, and what a Belgian walker needs to know before committing. Read it, then write to us if it suits you.
Trek Prices for Belgian Trekkers
These are our published prices converted to euros at 1 US dollar to 0.879 euro, the rate on 29 September 2026. The rate moves, and we quote and charge in US dollars, so treat the euro column as a close guide rather than a fixed number. Every trek comes in three levels and the difference between them is real, not cosmetic. Budget means you carry your own bag and your meals on the trail are not included. Standard adds a shared porter and all your meals. Luxury adds a porter of your own, better lodges, all meals, and on Everest a return helicopter to Lukla instead of the fixed-wing flight.
| Trek | Budget (€) | Standard (€) | Luxury (€) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everest Base Camp, 12 days | 1,230 | 2,197 | 4,395 |
| Annapurna Base Camp, 9 days | 439 | 703 | 1,231 |
| Ghorepani Poon Hill, 6 days | 439 | 659 | 977 |
| Langtang Valley, 8 days | 321 | 572 | 879 |
| Manaslu Circuit, 12 days | 703 | 1,406 | 1,846 |
| Mardi Himal, 7 days | 399 | 746 | 977 |
In dollars, which is what you will actually be charged, those same treks are 1,399, 2,499 and 4,999 for Everest Base Camp; 499, 799 and 1,400 for Annapurna Base Camp; 499, 749 and 1,111 for Poon Hill; 365, 650 and 1,000 for Langtang; 799, 1,599 and 2,099 for Manaslu; and 454, 849 and 1,111 for Mardi Himal.
A 10 percent deposit confirms your dates and you pay the balance in Kathmandu, in US dollars cash or by card. The deposit is non-refundable, and we do not refund the trek cost if you cancel, but if your plans change we will reschedule you free to any date within a year, as long as you give us at least 72 hours' notice, or 7 days for restricted-area treks like Manaslu. If we ever have to cancel a trip ourselves, we refund what you have paid, less taxes, bank and card charges, and anything already spent on your behalf such as permits and flights. A card payment carries 3.5 percent, cash carries nothing. We cannot take Nepali rupees from foreign clients, so bring dollars or plan to pay by card. The price you see holds for both 2026 and 2027 departures.
What Booking Direct Actually Gets You
The same trek, run by the family whose name is on it, at the ground price. We provide the down jacket, the four-season sleeping bag and the duffel free, made to our own specification, so you are not buying high-altitude kit in Brussels for one trip. Your guide is one of ours, licensed and government-trained and insured, and on Standard and Luxury a porter carries the heavy bag. And every booking helps fund our Nagarjun Learning Center, which I will come back to at the end.
How Do You Get to Kathmandu from Belgium?
There is no nonstop flight between Belgium and Nepal, and there never has been. You will change planes once. I want to be precise about this, because the internet is full of airline names that no longer fly here at all. Emirates and Etihad, for instance, do not serve Kathmandu, whatever a booking site suggests.
The two routings that genuinely work on one ticket from Brussels are Doha with Qatar Airways and Istanbul with Turkish Airlines. Both of those airlines fly Brussels and Kathmandu, so you hold a single ticket the whole way, which matters if a connection goes wrong. From Brussels the Istanbul routing is usually the quickest, at around thirteen hours in the air with the stop, and the Doha routing is close behind. Turkish and Qatar both run several flights a week into Kathmandu, so you have real choice of dates.
Two Nepali carriers, Himalaya Airlines and Nepal Airlines, also fly the Gulf into Kathmandu from Doha and Dubai, which sometimes gives you a cheaper final leg if you are willing to buy two separate tickets. You can also route through Delhi, Frankfurt or Amsterdam, but that usually means two carriers on separate tickets, and a missed connection on separate tickets is your problem, not the airline's. I would only do it with a long, comfortable layover.
Total travel time is usually somewhere between thirteen and seventeen hours with the stop, depending on how the connection falls. We do not sell your international flights and we make nothing on them, so take that as honest advice rather than a sales line. Fares climb for the October window and again for spring, so book early if you are coming in either season.
What Does a Belgian Walker Need to Know Before Booking?
Visa
Belgian passport holders get a tourist visa on arrival at Kathmandu airport. Bring a passport valid for at least six months, a passport photograph, and the fee in US dollars cash. The fee is USD 30 for 15 days or USD 50 for 30 days, and a 30-day visa covers every trek in the table above with room to spare. You can fill in the arrival form in advance on the official immigration portal to shorten the queue, which is worth doing in the October to November peak. It is a queue at the airport, not paperwork you arrange in Belgium beforehand.
Permits
Permits are inside the price we quote, so there is nothing extra for you to buy before you leave. For the record, national park entry in Nepal is a flat fee of 3,000 rupees per person with no tax added on top, and the restricted-area treks such as Manaslu carry their own permit which we arrange for you. You do not handle any of this yourself. We have every permit in hand before you reach the trailhead.
Insurance
You need travel insurance that covers trekking to the altitude of your chosen trek and, above everything else, helicopter evacuation. Ordinary European holiday policies usually stop well below Himalayan heights, so read the altitude limit in the wording rather than the summary page, and confirm that mountain rescue by helicopter is included. This is the one thing I will not let a client skip. A rescue you have to pay for yourself runs into thousands of euros. Buy the policy at home in Belgium. Do not buy insurance here in Nepal, because the helicopter operators and the hospitals frequently refuse the local policies at exactly the moment you need them to work.
Altitude, Not Gradient, Is the Difficulty
Belgium is flat, and the fear I hear most often is that a country with no real mountains cannot prepare you for the Himalaya. It is the wrong worry. If you can walk the hills of the Ardennes for a long day with a pack, you have the legs for our teahouse treks. What you will not have met is the air. Everest Base Camp sits at 5,364 metres and Kala Patthar above it at 5,545, which is nearly eight times the height of the Signal de Botrange, and you reach it by walking rather than climbing. That sounds easy and it is the exact reason people get into trouble. Altitude has no respect for fitness, and strong walkers are often the ones who go up too fast. This is why our Everest and higher treks build in acclimatisation days, why the pace is deliberately slow, and why your guide carries an oximeter and checks you every day. Our guides do not carry bottled oxygen, and on a properly paced trek you do not need it.
Food, Money and Language
Teahouse food on the trail is simple and filling rather than refined: dal bhat, the rice and lentil plate our guides quietly rely on because you can eat it twice a day and keep walking, plus noodles, potatoes, eggs and Tibetan bread. You will not find good coffee above Namche and I would rather tell you that now than have you discover it on day four. You change euros or dollars for rupees in Kathmandu, or draw rupees from a cash machine, for your own spending on the trail. Your balance to us is in dollars, as above. A local SIM is cheap in Kathmandu, most lodges have some form of wifi, and every one of our guides speaks English, so there is no language barrier on the trail. Belgium reads and speaks in Dutch, French and German, and if you would rather correspond in French or Dutch when you enquire, say so and we will do our best. On the trail itself the working language is English.
Which Trek Should a Belgian First-Timer Choose?
If you want the famous one and you have the time, the Everest Base Camp trek is the classic, and our full Everest cost breakdown takes it apart day by day and dollar by dollar. If you have less time, or you would rather build up to altitude gently, the Annapurna Base Camp trek puts you inside a true high-mountain amphitheatre in nine days, the same south side of Annapurna that Ingrid Baeyens climbed the hard way, and the shorter Ghorepani Poon Hill trek is the gentlest way in, six days with one of the finest sunrise viewpoints in the country.
For something quieter, the Langtang Valley trek sits close to Kathmandu and carries a fraction of the Everest traffic, and the Mardi Himal trek is a short, steep and beautiful ridge walk. If you have real mountain days behind you and you want wilderness rather than a trail with other people on it, the Manaslu Circuit crosses a 5,000 metre pass through country far emptier than the main routes. Manaslu sits in a restricted area, which means a licensed guide and an agency permit are compulsory, and your guide has to stay with you. That is not our rule, it is enforced at the army and police posts along the way.
When Is the Best Time to Trek from Belgium?
Two windows stand out. October into mid-November is the most reliable, with clear skies and settled weather after the monsoon, and it is also the busiest, so book early. March and April are the second season, warmer, with the rhododendron forests in flower. December to February is clear, very cold and very quiet, which some people love. Avoid June to mid-September, the monsoon, when the trails are wet and the mountains are behind cloud. One honest caveat about late October: the tail end of Bay of Bengal cyclones has disrupted two recent autumns, so if you are coming in the last week of the month, build a spare day into your flights home.
For Belgian walkers there is a happy practical point here. The autumn school break, the Toussaint and Herfstvakantie holiday at the end of October and the start of November, lands squarely in the best trekking window of the year. If you are tied to the school calendar, that week is genuinely one of the good ones to come, not a compromise. Tell me your exact dates and I will tell you honestly what the weather usually does around them.
About The Everest Holiday
We are a family company in Kathmandu, three generations of Himalayan guides, registered in 2016 and a member of the Trekking Agencies' Association of Nepal, number 1586. When you book with us you deal with the family, not a call centre, and the guide who meets you at the airport works for the same people who answered your first message. That is the whole point of booking direct.
Our Charity, the Nagarjun Learning Center
Every booking helps fund our Nagarjun Learning Center. We fully run the centre at Saldum, where 70 children learn with a teacher I pay for personally, and we have helped build and still support other community learning centres. It is not a line bolted on to the price. It is where a real part of what you pay ends up.
Frequently Asked Questions: Belgian Trekkers
Do Belgian citizens need a visa for Nepal?
You get a tourist visa on arrival at Kathmandu airport with a valid passport, a photograph and the fee in US dollars cash, USD 30 for 15 days or USD 50 for 30 days. There is no advance application for a normal trekking holiday.
Is there a direct flight from Brussels to Kathmandu?
No. There is no nonstop service between Belgium and Nepal. You change once, and the two routings that work on a single ticket are Doha with Qatar Airways and Istanbul with Turkish Airlines. Emirates and Etihad do not fly to Kathmandu, whatever a booking site shows.
How fit do I need to be?
If you can walk a long day in the Ardennes with a day pack, you have the fitness for our teahouse treks. Altitude rather than distance is the real difficulty, which is why we walk slowly and build in rest days. There is a trek in the table above for every level.
Can I pay in euros?
No. We quote and charge in US dollars, and the balance is paid in Kathmandu in dollars cash or by card, with 3.5 percent added on card payments. We cannot accept Nepali rupees from foreign clients. The euro figures in the table are a guide to help you plan, not the amount you will be charged.
Can I book for the Toussaint school holiday?
Yes, and it is good timing. The end-of-October break falls inside the most reliable trekking window of the year, so the weather is usually on your side. Send me your dates early, because it is also a busy period and flights fill.
Written by Shreejan Simkhada, CEO of The Everest Holiday and third-generation Himalayan guide. TAAN Member #1586.
Chat with Shreejan