How KindScore works

A KindScore is our assessment — an estimate assigned from publicly available information at the time the rating was produced, using a stated method applied the same way to every activity we rate. It is not a certification, an inspection, a directory listing, or travel-booking advice — it's a starting point for your own judgement about an activity, informed by what we could find and verify.

A KindScore is our best estimate from the public information available to us, but it may be incomplete, and it can go out of date as an operator changes how it runs things or as new information comes to light. See “Ratings quality” below for more on this, and how to tell us if something looks wrong.

Every activity is assessed on three separate dimensions — the planet (environmental footprint and conservation), animals (welfare and treatment of any animals involved), and people (local workers, communities and culture). Each axis gets its own rating, built only from findings that belong to it — an animal-welfare fact never influences the planet score, and vice versa.

A rating is built up from individual findings (“points”), not a single overall impression. Each point is either something we found solid evidence FOR (shown as a positive) or AGAINST (shown as a concern), and every axis rating is the balance of its own points.

That separation matters. An activity can score badly for animal welfare while still doing well for local communities and the planet, or the other way around — that's a real and common pattern, not an edge case. A single overall number can't show you which axis is driving a concern on its own, so alongside the overall KindScore we always show the three axis scores too, exactly so a specific problem doesn't disappear into one blended figure.

Every point that contributes to a rating carries a weight from 1 (marginal) to 5 (defining) — how significant the finding is and how strongly it's evidenced. A serious, thoroughly documented issue counts far more than a minor or thinly sourced one. Independently verified evidence — a genuine accreditation body, a regulator, news coverage, an NGO or academic assessment — counts for more than an operator's own unverified description of itself; a claim an operator makes about its own ethics or welfare is still shown to you, but at low weight, and can be outweighed by independent evidence either way.

Positive and negative points are then balanced against each other — axis by axis, and overall — and the result lands in one of five bands, from Very Poor to Excellent.

Some findings genuinely can't be scored either way — the facts are established, but whether they're good or bad is legitimately disputed, or the impact depends on operating conditions we couldn't verify for this specific operator. Those are shown separately as “Worth knowing” and marked not scored — they inform you without pretending to be a verdict, and they never move any rating.

Want the exact numbers behind a specific rating? Every result has a “Show how this score was calculated” button that breaks down each axis's points and how they add up to its rating.

Some kinds of activity carry a starting expectation based on how that type of activity is generally run — for example, keeping a wild animal captive purely for display is a real welfare concern even at a well-run facility. But that starting point is exactly that: a starting point. Specific, evidenced facts about the individual operator can strengthen it, weaken it, or reverse it entirely — we assess what an operator actually does, not what its category usually involves. The one exception: conduct that is illegal, that causes severe suffering or death to protected wildlife, or that causes harm at a systematic scale is always treated as serious, regardless of anything else about the operator.

We find that evidence the same way for every activity: the operator's own site, independent accreditation and regulatory bodies, news coverage, reviews, and other public sources — the same kind of search, run the same way, every time (see “How we keep ratings as fair as possible” below).

Any finding specific to an individual operator — a name, a number, a date, a ruling, a quote, an incident, anything true of that operator and not just of activities like it — must link to a real, public source. If we couldn't find one, we don't publish the point. A small icon-marked search link appears only for a fact that isn't specific to any one operator — general knowledge about an activity type, for instance — never as a stand-in for a source about the operator itself.

Tap any point on a KindScore result to see exactly where it came from, and to get a plain-English explanation of why it matters — that's available on every point, on every rating, whether or not you're signed in.

A KindScore can only draw on what's publicly available at the time we run it — an operator's own site, its accreditation, news coverage, reviews, and similar public records. Some real, relevant information doesn't surface well in a search: it might sit behind a login, live on a page search engines don't index well, or simply be missing entirely. Occasionally a source we did find turns out to be outdated, or wrong. A rating is our best estimate from what we could find — not a guarantee that we found everything, or that everything we found was current and correct.

If you ran the rating yourself, you can tap “Disagree? Report this rating” underneath it at any time. If you found a rating some other way — including if you run the activity we've rated — email us at hello@betravelkind.com with the activity and what you believe is inaccurate or out of date, and we'll review it.

A rating is only as trustworthy as the process behind it:

• We never seed a search or a prompt with a named example business. Every search we run is built from the operator being rated, not from other companies, so nothing we ask about can nudge a result toward or against anyone by name.
• Every activity goes through the same process, run the same way, whether it's a major international brand or a two-person local operator.
• If you think a rating is wrong, you can report it — see “Ratings quality” above.
• We do not accept payment, free experiences, or any other incentive from an operator in exchange for a better rating.
• We sometimes write our own blog posts about an operator, based on our own research and experience. Where we have, that post can be used as a source for the KindScore rating — but it's treated as one source among several, in our own stated voice, and never entirely decides the outcome on its own.