Travel experiences vetting: how do we do it?

We often get asked: How exactly do you vet travel experiences? This is a manual of how we do it, and is constantly being updated to reflect our latest thinking and approach.

Wildlife encounters

• Our first course of action is to do no harm. If we don't destroy and exploit in the first place, then there is no need to repair. Often in the travel industry, the megaphone has been given to people who do symbolic gestures to repair, ignoring the fact that they are also responsible for the exploitation and destruction in the first place. There are many tours we categorically will never feature - they are detailed in our wildlife welfare policy, co-written with World Animal Protection. The headline ones are:
  • Any animal performance
  • Any activity that makes an animal engage in unnatural behaviour
  • Elephant riding and bathing
  • Any activity that involves animal cruelty, including circuses with live animals
• We do not rely on any certification, but we lean heavily on in-house checks across different review websites and photos, especially user-generated content. We believe photo evidence often offers the biggest clues. Here are two case studies:
  • Case 1: Experiences in the Amazon. Below are photos from 'ethical' travel operators that are certified to meet animal welfare standards on other platforms, or are recommended by travellers on forums. All of which are highly rated. However, such feeding behaviour is never ethical, and it alters natural animal behaviour.

• Case study 2: Elephant sanctuaries. We believe the only ethical way to see an elephant is through a no-touch policy. Below are elephant experiences offered by ethical sanctuaries and endorsed by some B-Corp certified operators. Please note that we didn't upload photos showing them posing with tourists. They are better than some outright abusive sanctuaries that offer elephant riding and performances; however, we believe that the only ethical way of seeing an elephant is in the wild or through a no-touch sanctuary.

• We test the tour ourselves. You can find these in our Field Notes and on the experience page.

City and community tours

These tours normally pose little to no risk for wildlife. But there are a few things we don't support:

• Food tours that sample food from protected species or companion animals: examples include whale or dolphin meat. We firmly believe whaling and dolphin hunts are a sunset industry and must be stopped. We do not support eating dogs and cats, as they often come from stolen pets, and are often illegal under food hygiene laws.
• Poverty tours: the kind of tours that take one to a slum to see poverty
• Marginalised community tours: experiences that take one to see a community, see them live, work, or go about their lives, but the whole experience can feel like a human zoo. The issue is that income typically doesn't flow into the community, and in some instances, the authority has an incentive to maintain their marginalised/informal status, as it has become a tourist attraction. Many of these involve complicated histories that span cultural, religious, and ethnic lines, but a rule of thumb is that we don't normally support tours that take one to see a group of people as if they were a kind of curiosity.

We are by no means perfect, and we recognise that no tour operator can control everything that happens in a forest or at sea. However, we do our best to make science-based decisions, following the principle that every activity leaves a digital trace, which means that if an operator is not meeting our Policy, we can probably find it out online, or on the ground.

If you have any questions about the process or would like to raise concerns about a tour, please get in touch.