15 years of
adventure,
one chapter
at a time

Word spread the old-fashioned way — a German couple who trekked Everest Base Camp with AJ told their friends, who told their friends. By 2011 Swotah was welcoming its first groups from Germany, the UK and France. None of them had found Swotah through an advertisement. They came because someone they trusted had been on a trip and could not stop talking about it.

By 2014 the team had completed 1,000 treks across the Everest, Annapurna and Langtang regions without a single serious safety incident. That number meant something different to us than it did on paper. It meant 1,000 families waiting at home who got their person back safely. We marked the occasion quietly — a team dinner in Kathmandu, some rice and dal, a lot of laughter.

A lot of clients started asking the same question: can you take us higher? So we did. In 2016 Swotah expanded into technical climbing expeditions — Island Peak, Mera Peak, Lobuche East, Ama Dablam. We hired specialist high-altitude guides, many of them with Everest summits already on their record. The trekking side of the business had taught us how to look after people well. The climbing side would test whether that held at 6,000 metres.

After five consecutive years of Certificate of Excellence — the maximum TripAdvisor allows before a Hall of Fame upgrade — we received the 2018 Hall of Fame designation. We read every review that got us there. The ones that stayed with us were not the ones praising the mountain views. They were the ones that said things like: the guide checked on me every hour, or: I told them I was nervous and they adjusted the whole route. That is what the rating is made of.

When Nepal closed its borders in March 2020 the bookings disappeared overnight. We had over 60 guides, porters and operations staff who suddenly had no income. Some companies let people go immediately. We did not. For 18 months we maintained salary support, ran first-aid and English training programmes, and developed new routes for when the mountains opened again. It cost us nearly everything we had saved. It was also the easiest decision we ever made.

The post-pandemic surge in demand caught a lot of operators off guard. We were ready — partly because we had spent lockdown preparing, and partly because our guides had not gone anywhere. The 2022 season became our busiest ever. We welcomed travellers from 52 countries, passed 2,000 five-star reviews on TripAdvisor and maintained a 5.0 rating throughout. The mountain was still the mountain. We were just a little better at showing people the way.

We are still in the same Golfutar office where AJ started in 2009. The team is bigger, the routes are more varied and the reviews keep coming in from corners of the world we had never heard of in 2009. Sixteen years of doing this and the question we ask before every single trip is the same one AJ asked on his first day: what would make this person go home and tell everyone they know? That question has not gotten any easier to answer. That is probably why we still enjoy asking it.