Risky Trips Wealthy Travelers Book to the Highest and Lowest Points on Earth

Climbing Mount Everest for more than $200,000

Fans of Mount Everest with 199,000 euros, or roughly $218,400, to spare and limited time for long excursions can sign up for a three-week package with close expert attention and more than enough oxygen.

That’s pricey even for Everest trips, which National Geographic wrote last year could cost $40,000 to $100,000.

But the “Everest Signature Expedition,” offered by the Austria-based travel company Furtenbach Adventures, includes a series of provisions and services that its founder told Insider had helped ensure its perfect safety record and virtually guaranteed ability for its elite clients to summit.

“With a shorter expedition, you have less exposure to risk,” Lukas Furtenbach, the founder of Furtenbach Adventures, said. The company also has a US branch in Lake Tahoe.

The “Signature Expedition” includes a generator and tent sent to clients’ homes weeks before the trip, which can simulate the high-altitude air conditions of the climbing expedition and help clients acclimatize before they even embark on the trip. Furtenbach said spending less time on the mountains also reduced the likelihood of facing other dangers of the Himalayas, like avalanches.

Climbing Mount Everest is dangerous. There have been more than 300 known deaths of all those who’ve taken on the mountain, National Geographic reported, citing an online resource about the Himalayas called The Himalayan Database.

But his company’s premium expedition service also offers “unlimited oxygen,” Furtenbach said, to help mitigate one of the biggest threats of such extreme adventures.

“The Everest and the high altitude is a dangerous environment, similar to a sub going to the Titanic,” he said. “You usually have oxygen for limited amount of time.”

The oxygen reserves available to clients of the elite package accounts for a big part of the expedition’s high price tag, Furtenbach said. The company hires sherpas to carry oxygen cylinders up the mountain to be stashed there and to carry them back to the bottom.