When Tripseed pursued Travelife, we believed in shared standards that could lift responsible tourism across the industry. We achieved Travelife Partner status and explored the path toward full certification. Today, we are stepping away from both our Partner status and any further engagement with the framework. This is not a final goodbye, but a necessary pause, and we want to be transparent about our reasons while remaining hopeful that the gaps we have identified can be addressed.
We continue to respect the impact Travelife has had in raising awareness of sustainability across the global tourism industry.
This decision also follows a similar one we made two years ago when we ended our pursuit of B Corp certification after identifying comparable structural issues.
What We’re Not Asking For
Before we explain our concerns, we want to be absolutely clear. We are not demanding perfection from businesses seeking certification. Responsible tourism is a journey, and every operator begins at a different point along that road. Progress, not perfection, should be the goal.
However, there is a fundamental baseline that must be met first: legal compliance in the destinations where businesses operate. That means properly registering companies, paying taxes, complying with labour laws, and operating without discrimination. These are not aspirational sustainability goals. They are basic legal obligations.
Without a foundation of legality, every other sustainability claim rests on sand.
Some might argue that verifying legal compliance creates barriers for smaller businesses. But legal compliance is not a luxury or an optional standard for larger players. It is the cost of operating responsibly in any destination. When businesses ignore these obligations, it is not imperfection. It is a direct contradiction of the principles that responsible tourism stands for.
Because without a foundation of legality, every other sustainability claim rests on sand.
Our Concerns with Current Standards
Our decision to step back stems from several interconnected issues we have observed within the Travelife framework.
Transparency and Accountability
Responsible tourism depends on transparency. Certification should require businesses to disclose meaningful data that allows travellers and partners to make informed choices. At present, certification functions as a simple badge, with little visibility into what certified businesses actually do or how they compare.
Certified companies should publicly publish key metrics such as equity ratios, carbon footprints, local economic contribution as a share of revenue, salary parity, tax compliance, and more. Without these disclosures, certification risks becoming a marketing exercise rather than a measure of accountability.
Some argue that requiring transparency might discourage participation. That may be true, but fewer genuinely responsible businesses that are open about their practices would serve destinations better than many hiding behind opaque standards. Quality must come before quantity.
A badge alone cannot tell consumers whether Company A, which pays living wages and contributes 60 percent of its revenue to the local economy, should be considered equal to Company B, which pays minimum wage and extracts 80 percent offshore. Both may be certified, but they are not equally responsible.
Others suggest that any certification is better than none. We disagree. When certifications validate businesses operating outside the law, they do more than fail. They provide legitimacy to practices that harm destinations. They tell travellers these companies are responsible when the evidence says otherwise. And they send a message to local governments that international standards approve of behaviour that undermines their laws.
Auditing Depth
The current auditing standards, in our experience, do not adequately verify compliance with local laws and regulations. This is a critical blind spot.
Here in Thailand, where we work daily and understand the regulatory landscape, we have observed Travelife-certified businesses operating under nominee shareholder structures that appear to contravene both the Foreign Business Act and the Tourism Business and Tourist Guide Act. These are not minor technicalities. They are fundamental breaches of local law that distort ownership, accountability, and fair competition.
If audits are certifying businesses that operate outside legal boundaries in Thailand, where we can identify such issues firsthand, what happens in destinations where the rules are less visible or poorly understood? How many certified companies elsewhere are operating in ways that local communities can see, but international auditors miss?
A business cannot be responsibly breaking the law.
Some might say that enforcing local law is the job of governments, not certification bodies. That is true. Yet if a certification claims to verify responsible tourism practices, it cannot ignore legality simply because enforcement may be weak. A business cannot be responsibly breaking the law. Certifications that ignore this reality do not remain neutral. They risk undermining the sovereignty and regulatory frameworks of the very destinations they claim to support.
These gaps do not only weaken credibility. They harm the communities these standards were meant to protect.
This is not about catching every infraction. It is about asking the right questions. Are audits verifying business registration? Are they checking compliance with destination-specific tourism regulations? Are they confirming fair employment under local law? In our experience, these fundamental checks are not happening with the rigor they deserve.
Environmental Focus at the Expense of Social Sustainability
Environmental stewardship is essential, and we applaud every effort to reduce carbon footprints and protect natural resources. But responsible tourism rests on three pillars: environmental, social, and governance. When the balance tilts too heavily toward environmental metrics, while social sustainability and ethical governance are sidelined, the result is a distorted picture of responsibility.
A company can recycle, eliminate plastics, and offset emissions while still extracting wealth from the destination through tax avoidance or labour exploitation. Both matter. Both must be measured. Both must be enforced with equal rigor.
The Legal Compliance Gap
Beyond verifying legal registration and corporate structures, certification must also verify tax compliance. Taxes are where principle becomes practice. They are how businesses genuinely contribute to the destinations that host them.
Tax compliance is complex, and it varies between countries. That is precisely why destination-specific auditing is essential, not optional. If certification bodies lack the expertise to verify compliance, they should either develop that expertise or acknowledge the limitation, rather than certifying businesses without evidence.
When companies avoid paying local taxes, those costs do not disappear. They are absorbed by the communities that host them. Every dollar lost to tax avoidance is a dollar that cannot fund schools, hospitals, or the infrastructure that tourism itself relies upon. This is not a paperwork issue. It is a principle issue. At scale, tax avoidance does not just undermine sustainability efforts. It transforms tourism from a tool for development into a mechanism for extraction.
If tourism’s purpose is to uplift, certification must never legitimise extraction.
But this challenge extends far beyond any single organisation.
An Industry-Wide Challenge
The issues we describe are not unique to Travelife. Many certification schemes, including B Corp, share similar weaknesses. The explosion of sustainability labels has created a marketplace where badges can be acquired without necessarily driving systemic change.
This is why we have chosen a different route. As a social enterprise, we have committed to transparent revenue distribution, pay equity, comprehensive tax disclosure, and genuine community engagement. We are developing frameworks to bring greater transparency to how tourism revenue flows within destinations, and we intend to share them openly so others can adopt and improve upon them.
We do not claim perfection. We are still learning, still improving, and always open to scrutiny. But we have found that defining our own standards and being directly accountable to our stakeholders drives more meaningful change than certification programs currently achieve.
Looking Forward
We genuinely hope this is “see you later” rather than “goodbye.” The need for strong, credible industry standards remains vital. We would welcome improvements that include:
- Verification of legal business registration and ownership structures in destination countries
- Rigorous verification of country-by-country tax compliance
- Auditing of employment practices under local law
- Greater transparency in audit methodologies and findings
- Balanced attention to environmental, social, and governance criteria
- Clear enforcement mechanisms for non-compliance
- Public reporting on how certified businesses meet these standards
If these changes were made, we would gladly return to the Travelife framework and resume our pursuit of full certification. Collaboration has far greater potential for impact than isolation, and collective standards will always be stronger than individual pledges.
Walking the Walk
Tourism faces a defining question. Will we serve the communities that host us, or keep applying superficial fixes while maintaining extractive systems?
Certifications should be transformative, not decorative. They should drive genuine accountability, not provide cover for business-as-usual painted green. The industry needs certification bodies that set clear baselines, enforce them rigorously, and are transparent about their own processes.
We remain committed to responsible tourism that places people and places above profit. We remain open to collaboration with anyone who shares that commitment. And we remain optimistic that with greater transparency and shared accountability, certifications like Travelife can become catalysts for the kind of systemic change our industry urgently needs.
Certifications should be transformative, not decorative.
Tripseed will continue our work as a social enterprise, keep developing transparent methodologies, and advocate for tourism that truly serves destinations. We invite Travelife, other certification bodies, and industry peers to join us in raising the bar together.
The communities that welcome us deserve nothing less than our full commitment to operate responsibly within their societies, beginning with meeting our basic legal obligations to them.
We welcome dialogue about these issues. If you are part of Travelife’s team, or another certification body working to address these challenges, we would genuinely love to hear from you.