Nepal Airlines Is Flying to Tokyo Four Times a Week This Autumn, and the Timing Is No Accident

Nepal Airlines will fly its Kathmandu–Tokyo route four times a week from 18 September 2026, adding a fourth weekly rotation on one of its most important long-haul services just as the country's autumn festival and trekking season reaches its peak. The extra frequency, confirmed in the carrier's published schedule, runs through to 20 November and is flown by the airline's wide-body Airbus A330-200.

For a national carrier that flies only a handful of long-haul routes, quietly adding a fourth Tokyo frequency is not a small decision. The airline is committing its largest aircraft to the run at the single busiest travel window in the Nepali calendar — and the timing tells you exactly who it is chasing.

Why the fourth flight, and why now

Autumn is when Nepal comes home. Dashain and Tihar, the two biggest festivals of the year, fall in October and early November, and the Nepali diaspora in Japan — one of the largest overseas Nepali communities — travels back in force. The revised schedule, which runs almost exactly from mid-September to late November, is built around that homecoming rush. If you are planning a trek around the holidays, our guide to the 2026 Dashain and Tihar dates lays out what closes and when.

The same weeks are also Nepal's premier trekking season. September to November brings the year's most stable skies and its heaviest trail traffic, and Tokyo Narita is a major connecting hub for trekkers arriving from across East Asia, the Pacific and North America. A wide-body with more seats and more cargo hold, four times a week, is Nepal Airlines betting on both markets at once.

Nepal is bulking up its front doors for autumn

The Tokyo boost lands in the middle of the busiest stretch of international-capacity growth Nepal has seen in years. From 23 September, flydubai begins the first-ever daily international service into Pokhara, giving Annapurna-bound trekkers a Gulf-connected route that skips Kathmandu entirely — we covered that launch in detail here. Between a fourth Tokyo flight into the capital and a brand-new daily gateway into the mountains, the autumn arrivals map looks materially different from a year ago.

The demand is real. Nepal drew 692,887 international visitors in the first seven months of 2026, up 6.84% on the same period last year, according to figures reported by Nepal's tourism press — and that is before the autumn peak has even started. Even July, the deepest point of the monsoon lull, edged up 2.3% year on year, with Chinese arrivals jumping 61% to surpass pre-Covid levels.

What this means for trekkers

Source: AeroRoutes; arrivals data via Nepal tourism press (Nepal News).

Cover photo: TMLN123 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).