Private and bespoke expeditions

Every trip on this site can be run privately, for your party alone, on dates you choose. Beyond that we plan expeditions that are not in the catalogue at all: an objective nobody currently sells, a combination of valleys that does not fit a standard itinerary, a reconnaissance, a first ascent, or a route someone in your group has wanted to walk for twenty years.

What private actually changes

Not the standards. The guide ratios, the medical kit and oxygen inventory, the acclimatisation and turn-back criteria and the evacuation procedure are the same documents on a private trip as on a fixed departure, and the lead guide’s decisions are still final. A private party does not buy the right to be taken somewhere we would not take a group.

What it changes is pace, dates, party composition and route. You can take an extra acclimatisation day because somebody in the party wants one. You can start on a Tuesday. You can take fourteen days over something we normally run in eleven, or ask us to build something that has no page on this site.

How the price works

Private trips are quoted by party size and the figure per person falls as the party grows, because a vehicle, a guide and a cook cost close to the same whether there are two of you or eight. Short road-based trips move most with party size; long expeditions move most with peak royalty, which is charged per team. We will quote both shapes if it is not obvious which suits you.

Routes that are not in the catalogue

We will say no to objectives we cannot run well, and we will say so early rather than after a deposit. The test is the same one we apply to everything on this site: crew in that valley, permits obtainable, a season that works, and a guide who has personally been there. Where one of those is missing we will tell you what is missing rather than quoting anyway.

Exploratory objectives — unclimbed peaks, unvisited valleys, reconnaissance for a later attempt — are something we do run, and they are planned differently: longer, with more reserve days, and with the honest expectation that the objective may turn out not to go.

Starting the conversation

Tell us the objective, the rough dates, the party and anything that constrains it — a knee, a fear of exposure, a fixed return flight. A named person replies within four working hours. We would rather spend an hour on the phone establishing that a trip is wrong for you than sell it and find out at 4,000 m.

Request a quote, or see the full range of trips we run.