"Sustainable" and "eco-friendly" show up on almost every hotel website now. But, what do these words really mean? A resort can plaster "eco-friendly" across its homepage and still have single-use plastic everywhere, in-with no phase-out plan. A "sustainable" safari lodge can mean anything from an actual conservation partnership to a single-row garden for photos.

At Altered Atlas, a partner earns a place on the itinerary by meeting our published standards.

These criteria are applied to every hotel, guide, and operator, adapted from Global Sustainable Tourism Council criteria and the vetting frameworks used by Tourism Cares and Regenerative Travel's Agency of Change network. What a property's own website claims about itself has no bearing on that score.

The three disqualifiers

There are three issues that will immediately remove a partner from contention.

• A guest-facing operation with single-use plastic and no documented phase-out plan

• Credible, verified reports of labor exploitation, unsafe working conditions, or wage theft

• Any Indigenous-owned or Indigenous experiences operating without documented community consent or control

Six categories every partner must have

Past the disqualifiers, we score every partner across six categories:

• Local ownership and economic benefit

• Environmental practice,

• Community and cultural engagement (including written consent for any experience involving an Indigenous community)

• Labor and welfare

• Climate commitment

• Regulations regarding wildlife

A partner needs to score Adequate or higher in each of the five. Falling to Insufficient in even one category puts the partner on hold, no matter how strong the other four scores are.

A five-star resort with a good environmental record and conservation program, but no documented labor standards for its staff isn't a fit. So is a community-owned lodge with a wonderful local-ownership story, but no plan for managing its own waste.

What doesn't count

A property doesn't pass by simply telling us it's committed to sustainability. General claims without evidence mean nothing.

We look for specific and verifiable commitments like third-party reporting we can check against public data.

Read more about how we vet every partner. To learn more about how you can vet hotels, restaurants and activities on your own, download the Conscious Luxury Traveler's Guide.