Most tour operators treat group size as a line in the small print. Intrepid treats it as the product. The company puts “usually 12 to 14 people” on its own page describing why to travel with it, and almost every other decision it makes follows from that number.
Our score: 4.8 out of 5. The basis is printed above and unpacked below: a B Corp score of 102.5, a cap the company holds to, and local leaders running more than 900 trips across all seven continents.
Why the number matters more than it reads
Twelve people fit in one minibus, at one restaurant table, and inside a family home that agrees to host a lunch. Fifty do not. The cap is what makes a village guesthouse a plausible overnight stop instead of a photo opportunity from the coach window, and it is why Intrepid trips keep turning up in places that have no hotel with a lobby.
It also changes the pace of a day. A group of twelve clears a border post in twenty minutes. The same crossing with a full coach is an hour of standing, and the itinerary has to be written around that hour.
The B Corp score, and what 102.5 is actually counting
Intrepid was the first global tour operator to certify as a B Corp, and at its second recertification it scored 102.5, up from 91.2 in 2021. The figure is not a rating of the holidays. It is an audit of the company: how it pays people, who owns it, what it buys, how it governs itself, and what it does in the places it sends travellers to.
Context helps here. Only around 20 per cent of certified B Corps with more than a thousand employees clear 100 points at all, which puts Intrepid in a small band of large companies that have passed the harder version of the same test. Recertification happens on a cycle, so the score is a current statement rather than a founding claim from a decade ago.
For a traveller comparing two brochures, the practical read is narrow but real: the money paid for the trip is more likely to reach the country the trip happens in.
Carbon labels on the trip page
Intrepid has been carbon neutral since 2010. In 2020 it became the first tour operator with verified science based targets, committing to emissions reductions to 2035 in line with a 1.5°C pathway, and by 2026 it had put carbon labels on more than 500 of its trips.
The label sits on the itinerary page next to the price, expressed per person for the whole trip. It is the sort of number that only becomes useful in comparison, and comparison is exactly what it enables: the same two weeks in Peru, one version routed by internal flight and one by overnight bus, stop being an abstract argument about virtue and become two figures a person can choose between.
Who is actually running your trip
Intrepid calls the people at the front of its groups “locally-based leaders”, and the phrasing is deliberate. The leader on a trip through northern Vietnam is from northern Vietnam. Behind them sits a network of more than 25 destination management companies that Intrepid owns or runs itself rather than subcontracting to a third party in each country.
That structure is the reason the same trip runs the same way in March and in October. It is also why leaders can change a day on short notice when a road closes, which a subcontracted supplier working to a fixed script generally cannot do.
The catalogue now runs past 900 trips in more than 100 countries, sorted by trip style rather than by region: Original, Premium, Family, Food, Cycling, Expeditions, and a set of women-only departures. Choosing the style first and the country second turns out to be the faster way through the site.
What Intrepid is built for
The average Intrepid trip runs around $2,500, which is a mid-market price for a two-week guided itinerary with accommodation, most transport and a local leader included. Flights to the start point are usually separate, and the trip notes say so on the page rather than at checkout.
That cap is the whole proposition, and it defines who the company serves. A family that wants a private driver, its own start time each morning and a room upgrade at every stop is buying a different kind of holiday, and for that kind of trip people more often go to Cox & Kings. A traveller who wants a fixed price, a set departure date and eleven other people to eat dinner with is buying exactly what Intrepid makes.
Two more things worth knowing before booking. Departures for popular routes in high season fill months ahead, and the small group size is precisely why they fill: there are a dozen seats, not fifty. And the trip style shown on the page sets the accommodation standard for the whole route, so Original and Premium versions of the same itinerary follow the same map and sleep in different places.
Group sizes, trip counts and B Corp score checked in September 2026.
