How comfortable are the “comfort” accommodations?
Comfortable enough, definitely. Not Four Seasons luxurious, or even I-65 Comfort Inn luxurious, but plenty comfortable for our purposes.
We mostly stayed in properties owned by Mountain Lodges of Nepal, formerly known as Yeti Mountain Home. How I lament the change of name!
The Mountain Lodges are great, some of the best places you can stay in the region. They all provide a high level of service, with happy hour before dinner every evening, plenty of hot water for drinking and filling water bottles, and generous meals.
The beds are comfortable and spacious, and they come with lots of covers. They also have electric bed-warming pads, which are great when the electricity is running.
The rooms aren’t heated. Hence the electric bed warmers/electric blankets. Nighttime temperatures dropped below freezing most of the time we were in the Khumbu (in MAY), which meant our rooms were darn cold. We appreciated pre-warmed beds.
The power was out several nights in Namche, which meant no warm beds. Bala had the staff give us hot-water bottles, which helped.
Most of these lodges advertise their hot showers. This should be taken with several grains of salt. To be sure, we had showers in our bathrooms. But the showers were heated with solar energy, and solar only works when it’s sunny. At least half the time, it was cloudy, if not outright raining/snowing. The showers weren’t very hot those days. Our third night in Namche, the electricity had been out for 24 hours and it had been snowing. We didn’t even try to shower that day.
The hottest shower we had was in Pangboche. It was gas heated.
In Pangboche, we stayed at an Everest Summit Lodge, which was very nice. It has two categories of room, “comfort” and regular. It also has two dining rooms so the comfort guests don’t have to mix with the riff raff.
In Deboche, we stayed at Rivendell Lodge. The newest Mountain Lodge has just opened in Deboche, so presumably future itineraries will stay there. Rivendell is more basic than the Mountain Lodges, more like a standard lodge; this was the only place where the dining room was actually full of guests.
In Phortse, we stayed at a Sherpa Lodge. We shared a double room and used the toilet down the hall. No showers that day either.
Meals were excellent and plentiful. The Mountain Lodges served multi-course lunches and dinners and the staff would come around the tables with pots offering seconds of everything. Breakfasts were made to order; we came to favor the masala omelet.