Nepal Domestic Flight Fares Are Up 40% in 2026 — What It Means If You're Flying to Pokhara or Lukla

Nepal's domestic airlines lost more than half a million passengers in the fiscal year that ended on July 16, 2026 — and if your trip depends on a short hop to Pokhara for the Annapurna region, or a connecting flight toward Lukla for Everest, the fallout has already reached your itinerary. A near-doubling of jet fuel prices in April pushed fares up by as much as 40 percent on some routes and left planes across the country flying half empty.

The trigger was a spike in global aviation fuel prices tied to this spring's wider energy shock. Nepal Oil Corporation raised the price of domestic ATF by 97.6 percent overnight on April 1, then added a further NPR 6 a litre just over a week later. That easily overtook the previous record of NPR 190 a litre, set during an earlier fuel shock in September 2022 — airline managers who survived that crisis are calling this one worse. Buddha Air, the country's largest domestic carrier, watched daily passengers slide from around 8,000 to 6,500 and cut its own flight schedule by a quarter. Shree Airlines reported a 30 to 40 percent daily drop, from roughly 3,000 passengers to 2,000. Yeti Airlines leadership told the Kathmandu Post the international energy shock hit Nepal's domestic sector squarely, and the passenger numbers back that up.

None of this shows up as a headline about Everest or Annapurna. It shows up as a quieter airport, a smaller aircraft swapped onto a route that used to run three daily flights, and a fare that's simply higher than the one your itinerary was priced against last season — exactly the routes trekkers fly every autumn and spring.

What this means for trekkers

Trekkers heading to Pokhara have one advantage Everest-bound travellers don't: a paved overland alternative. Tourist buses and private jeeps still connect Kathmandu and Pokhara along the Prithvi Highway in roughly seven to nine hours, longer where road construction is active, and that option is likely to see more demand while airfares stay elevated. There's no equivalent backup for Lukla — the only realistic way into the Khumbu is by air, or on foot from Jiri — which is exactly why booking flights as early as your dates allow, and building at least one buffer day into any Lukla-dependent itinerary, matters more this year than most. A well-planned Everest Base Camp itinerary already carries spare days for this kind of disruption; an Annapurna-region trek through Pokhara is now feeling the same fuel pressure Everest routes have managed for years. The mountains aren't going anywhere — the seat on the plane to reach them is simply costing more to hold.

Source: Kathmandu Post, reporting on Nepal Oil Corporation pricing and domestic airline passenger data for fiscal year 2025-26.

Cover photo: Superikonoskop via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).