Guy Cotter

But this one's great because he made it back down safely, and that's a wonderful result.

Exactly.

All the time.

And, you know, there are many incidences where there are fatalities on the mountain that are completely avoidable.

But again, a lot of it comes back down to the scenario we've got where you've got so much competition from Nepalese operators that they're putting out these cheap expeditions, which all look good to the prospective customer.

until something goes wrong.

And then you find out the quality of the operation that you're with.

And for those of us who have been there for many, many years, none of this is new.

This was happening 30 years ago with some of the cheap Western operators who were under-resourced with lack of qualified guides, lack of good equipment, not good communication equipment.

What has happened in the meantime is that we've had the emergence of the Nepalese operators who can offer cheap trips because they don't have to pay the same fees as we do.

And so it looks very alluring to the prospective client who's shopping on the internet for an Everest trip.

And they're sold on this thing.

Oh, you don't need one of those expensive Western operators.

You just need to come with us and we're just as good, if not better.

You're supporting the locals.

And that all looks good.

until you scratch below the surface and see that in a lot of cases there's a lot of exploitation of their own people going on.

There's just a lack of awareness of what guiding people on the mountain actually is, being able to look after people as well as looking after your own staff.

We Western operators, we would be in jail if we operated according to the standards that a lot of the operators perform by over there in the pool.

there are still a large number of operators who they will have up to 60 clients on the expedition.