Sustained Travel Framework — Independent Assessment
Methodology
How every Sustained Travel Framework rating is produced, what it covers, and what it does not cover.
1.What this is
The Sustained Travel Framework is an independent assessment of a travel operator's practices across five separate areas: safety and wellbeing, wildlife and nature, fair treatment of workers and communities, environmental impact, and cultural respect.
This is not a certificate or seal of approval, and it is not awarded by any accreditation body on our behalf. It is an independently produced rating, built and published under our own methodology.
Every rating an operator receives is measured against a fixed set of published thresholds, set in advance of any assessment. Operators are never rated against each other — reaching a given tier depends only on how an operator's own evidence measures up against those thresholds, not on how it compares with any other operator assessed.
2.The five pillars
Every assessment covers five fixed areas, always presented in the same base order: Safety & Wellbeing, Wildlife & Nature, Fair Treatment & Community, Environmental Impact, and Cultural Respect.
The order in which these five areas are shown is never changed based on how well an operator performed. It may be reordered — bringing one area to the front — only when the operator has declared a specific operating context that makes that area especially relevant, such as running adventure activities or operating in wildlife settings.
A sixth area, governance, is also assessed as part of every review, covering matters such as anti-bribery measures and legal-compliance confirmations. Governance is never shown to the public as its own rating, but a serious governance shortfall can still cap an operator’s overall rating, even when every other area performed well.
3.How an assessment works
Each question in an assessment asks how strong the evidence is for a specific practice. The same five-step scale applies throughout, moving from weakest to strongest: a written statement, a written policy, a genuine record showing the practice happening, a sustained record showing it happening over time, and independent confirmation of the practice by someone outside the operator.
The exact number of questions asked depends on the activities an operator has declared — an operator running wildlife encounters or adventure activities, for instance, answers additional questions specific to those activities that a purely office-based operator does not.
Earning the highest tier this assessment can award does not require holding a third-party certificate or scheme membership. A sustained, well-evidenced record that a non-conflicted reviewer can independently confirm is enough on its own to reach the top of the scale.
4.How ratings are calculated
Each of the five pillars is rated by looking at both the weakest area of evidence within it and how consistently strong the rest of the evidence is. A pillar can only reach its highest rating when every question within it clears the strongest level of evidence — falling short on even one relevant question holds the whole pillar back, no matter how strong the rest of the evidence is. No pillar rating is ever produced by averaging.
The same logic carries one level up to produce the overall rating. It is held back by whichever of the five pillars performed the weakest, and it can only reach its highest level when the great majority of pillars also reach a correspondingly high level — never by averaging across the five.
5.Circuit breakers
Certain findings act as circuit breakers: automatic overrides that step in regardless of how well an operator scored everywhere else. A small number of these are severe enough that they rule out any positive rating altogether, for the whole operator. A smaller, separate group is scoped to a single pillar, holding that one area back without necessarily affecting the other four.
Whenever a circuit breaker is triggered, the outcome is always reflected in the published rating. The specific finding that triggered it is never published or otherwise disclosed publicly.
6.The Exemplary distinction
An operator that reaches the highest overall tier, Leading, may additionally be shown as Leading — Exemplary. This distinction reflects a level of evidence strength well beyond what is required simply to reach Leading itself.
The Exemplary distinction is entirely optional recognition on top of an already-Leading result. It is never required to reach the Leading tier itself, and its absence does not reduce or otherwise affect a Leading rating in any way.
7.Scope and limitations
A rating reflects the practice an operator has evidenced, not the on-the-ground impact of that practice — the assessment measures what an operator does and how well it is evidenced, not outcomes in the field that fall outside what evidence can directly show.
Two operators with identical evidenced practice receive the same rating regardless of size. A small, single-site operator and a large, multi-site group that can each show the same strength of evidence for the same practice are rated identically — scale is not, by itself, a factor.
This assessment does not certify legal compliance in any jurisdiction, and it does not guarantee the safety of any individual trip. It is not a substitute for a traveler's own research, judgement, or travel insurance.
8.Validity and reassessment
An assessment is a point-in-time review. It reflects the evidence that was current and available when the assessment was carried out, not an ongoing or continuous check on the operator's practices afterward.
Every published rating carries the date it was assessed, and is valid for one year from the decision that produced it. After that year, the rating is no longer current, and the operator would need to complete a fresh assessment to publish an up-to-date rating.
There is no continuous monitoring between assessments. What happens at an operator between one assessment and the next is not reflected in a rating already published.
9.Independence and integrity
Every assessment is reviewed independently by two separate people who reach their own conclusions without seeing each other's work, and a decision is then made by someone who took part in neither review. No single person can award a rating on their own.
Assessors are paid a fixed rate for their work, agreed in advance and unrelated to the outcome they reach on any particular assessment. No operator can pay a fee, of any size, to receive a higher rating.
Every conclusion reached is required to be evidence-based and reproducible — a different, similarly qualified assessor working from the same evidence should reach the same result. The Sustained Travel Framework methodology is built toward the international standards ISO/IEC 17029 and ISO/IEC 17065. Formal accreditation against those standards is an active, ongoing process, and is not yet complete.
Try the Quick Assessment to see an indicative picture of where your business might stand.