AT supplied much better tents and more of them compared with International Mountain Guides in 2006.  My tent at Everest base camp in 2007 was bigger than in 2006.  This year we also had our own tent at C2 for duration of the expedition, allowing us to create a home away from home.  In 2006 we had to pack up all our gear at C2 whenever we left, as someone else could be using our tent in the meantime.

Dining
This is only a small thing, but at night at BC it gets very cold and both IMG and AT supplied a gas heater to warm the dining tent during dinner time.  In 2006 at about mid May, we ran out of gas and no more was made available.  We had plenty of gas in 2007 with AT.

The dining tent provided by AT this year was brown coloured, so it made it somewhat darker inside during the day - see picture.  I know they also have lighter coloured dining tents, so it’s probably luck of the draw.  IMG provided a new blue tent in 2006, which was great, although it was too small for the size of the group.

More smaller groups
I was particularly impressed that Asian Trekking didn’t combine all the people that they were organising logistics for into one base camp.  Other groups (the scouts team of 6 people) could have easily been combined into our group of 8, but they had separate Sherpas, base camp area, dining tent, Camp 2 cooks and tents & sirdar.  The guys on Lhotse also were completely separate too.  It was much nicer having fewer people in the team than the large numbers with IMG in 2006.  Organisation was easier, the dining tent could be smaller and warmer, but provide more space, meal times were less congested, we knew all the Sherpas.  It was much more personal.

Camps on the mountain
Positioning of camps on the mountain is really important, particularly at C3.  You want the highest spots so that your journey to the next camp is less.  Some groups were an hour lower than us at C3 on the Lhotse face and this is significant additional amount of time that you have to climb on your summit bid.  Both years we had good spots and this year IMG had the highest and we were the second highest.