← TravelConservation · the method
Methodology · a living document
One promise holds the whole site up: if we couldn't verify the work, it isn't here. This page is how that promise is kept — and how the keeping keeps improving.
No operator writes themselves in. Names enter through public evidence, and every step between a registry and the field journal is recorded:
Each published operator carries three independent measures, drawn side by side and never averaged — because a city hotel with tidy paperwork must not outrank a ranger post at the end of a supply line:
Documented operational compliance, weighed across six dimensions: certifications 20%, supply chain 20%, carbon 20%, packaging 15%, narrative honesty 15%, circularity 10%.
The size of what's actually protected — land, species, community programs. An operator with no conservation work at all scores nothing here, and that absence is shown, not padded.
How hard the operating environment is, and how direct the protection work — the axis that gives a war-zone ranger post its due.
never averaged, never blended — three answers to three different questions
A trust tier appears on an operator's card only once the documented evidence clears the bar — below it, the card leads with the scale of the work instead.
A certification counts by what it audits and how independent the auditor is — so each body carries its own evidence weight in the trust score:
When this site hands a traveler to an operator, the hand-off itself is counted in an outbound ledger — who was sent, from which page, to which door. That ledger is how we can show operators real numbers, and how you can hold our recommendations to account.
Some outbound links may become paid partnerships. Counting never affects who is listed — vetting does. We are not a certification body; we read public evidence, weigh it in the open, and say so when we can't verify something.
Checking travel honestly is young work. As better practices prove themselves, this method absorbs them — and every absorption is dated here.
seeing a practice we should absorb? — write to us. this line is reserved for it.
The outbound ledger. Every traveler handed to an operator is now counted, page to door, so recommendations are auditable — and disclosed.
The flight leg absorbed. Airlines joined the impact ledger, read live from the shared entity hub and graded on the same rubric family as operators.
Imagery held to the same bar. Photographs license-verified and credited where they appear; generated imagery always disclosed, never presented as documentary.
Three axes, unblended. The single-number credibility score was retired for three independent measures — trust, impact scale, frontline difficulty.
Protected Planet joined discovery. Operator names now also surface from the UN-backed World Database on Protected Areas, alongside sweeps of five certification registries.