Tribes' Social & Environmental Rating System

Tribes undertakes a Social & Environmental Review of accommodation we recommend. This involves sending out a very detailed questionnaire which the accommodation self-completes. Based on the answers received, we do three things:  

1. We review the accommodation on both their social and their environmental efforts, and give a globe rating for both. 
         60-74% = 3 Globe
         75-89% = 4 Globe
         90% +   = 5 Globe
2. We make the ratings available to clients on our website page of the specific hotel. Should anyone wish to know a summary of why the lodge received a certain score, we're happy to advise.
3. We can feed the review back to the lodge so that they can see that the efforts they have gone to are appreciated, or so that they can consider any possible changes.

We are aware that this system is not fool-proof, but we know that we go much further than most travel companies in trying to ensure that the tourism facilities and services we work with have minimal impact on, and preferably benefit, their local people and environment.

Auditing the answers given on the questionnaires is a huge task for any company –let alone a small, independent company such as ours. We therefore ask that our clients feed back anything relevant to us when they visit. Your help in this matter is hugely appreciated, and we feel we really can begin the make a difference.   Of course, when we travel ourselves to research hotels, we also check out answers to the best of our ability.

Whilst a previous (and far less detailed) version of this review has been in use at Tribes since 2000, we began to send out the current questionnaire in February 2007. For this reason, we have only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of obtaining all the accommodation questionnaires back from lodges and hotels. We've currently audited about 270 accommodation. It is an ongoing process to complete this massive task, and no-one really likes filling in questionnaires!  So please bear with us if the lodge you’re interested does not yet have a Social and Environmental review - we are working on it.