"Eco-friendly" gets used loosely in this industry, so here are five concrete questions worth asking any operator, including us:
- Do park fees and permit costs appear as a separate line item, or are they folded invisibly into one number?
- Are your driver-guides and office staff mostly local hires?
- Is there a defined, named community fund, and can you say roughly what it supports?
- Do you cap group sizes at gorilla and chimp encounters to the legal limit, even in peak season?
- Will you tell you honestly when a shorter, simpler itinerary suits you better than a longer one?
We built our own Sustainability Benchmark score around these same questions — it's not a universal industry standard, just our attempt to make the answers visible on every itinerary rather than buried in a policy page.
