Travel better on a locally run trekking Holiday

At K2 base camp Treks, we are local, and we work with local service providers big and small, between them covering just about every corner in Pakistan. Booking with a local operator ensures that you support local communities; we employ local staff, guides, porters, drivers, transport, and use local tour leaders. We often stay in locally run accommodation and eat at local restaurants. Unlike many foreign-based companies, we are a local tour operator, so there are no middlemen to run the holidays. In a way, you are directly paying the local people and helping the local communities and businesses.

Booking directly with a local tour operator, not only are you paying less, but all your money will be staying in the country, funding local salaries, and paying for local goods and services.

It also ensures that you support not just local employees – such as guides and porters – but local hotels and businesses. Tourism is a fantastic industry for creating jobs in places with high unemployment, in developing countries and rural areas – but so often, these jobs can be unskilled, and local people often fail to find work as mountain guides or tour leaders. With a local tour operator, like K2 Base camp Treks, you are supporting local tourism professionals and showing local people that they can grow in their careers while staying with their families in their native villages and towns.

When you travel with a local tour company, you deal with a person who lives and belongs there. And the communities that you visit – they feel a sense of ‘belongingness’ to the business. They have a say, power, and authority over what they are providing to the tourists, and it means they will also protect their environment. They will not think it belongs to someone else.

As a local operator of Pakistan, we have set up a system and environmental initiatives to support the local staff throughout the year. And as people who live and grown up in these mountains, you can be sure that the local communities have taken on board – rather than being developed as someone overseas thought it sounded like a cool idea.