Family travel, verified.
Most travel sites list what hotels say about themselves. We check whether it's true.
Before a property, a destination or an activity appears on Tribes, it goes through three filters — built for one job: making sure what you see is what you get when you arrive with your kids.
Aggregate
We pull every signal a family needs from the places it actually lives — global hotel inventories, open mapping data, traveller reviews, official hotel websites. So you stop opening tabs.
Curate
We surface only what works for families. A hotel without family rooms, supervised care, kid-friendly dining and a strong rating doesn't make the cut — no matter how big its marketing budget is.
Verify
For every claim that matters to a family booking — kids clubs, family amenities, destination facts — we go back to the primary source and check.
How a property makes it onto Tribes.
Every property is built up in four layers. A property has to pass each one to move to the next. We don't water down the badges — most properties don't earn them.
From everything to the few.
We start with a global hotel inventory of more than a million properties through our distribution partners. In the regions we cover today — 2,808,524 properties across 18 countries — we plot every one onto a precise map and pull in its full profile: amenities, photos, room types, occupancy, guest reviews.
That's the "everything in one place" promise. From there, two filters narrow it hard — 2,868 become Tribes properties, and only 1,443 become Families' favourites.
Family-first filter.
These are the criteria a property has to meet to be part of Tribes at all. It must satisfy every one of them — miss a single criterion and it doesn't make it onto the platform, no matter how big its marketing budget is.
Rooms that work for families — family rooms, connecting rooms, or rooms that fit more than three guests.
Care for children — supervised on-site care or arrangeable babysitting.
Things for kids to do — an on-site children's activities programme.
Family-friendly dining — a dedicated kids' menu or a restaurant set up for family service.
No disqualifying signals — adults-only, age restrictions, or other family-blockers.
Minimum quality — verified guest rating of 8.0 or higher.
Reliable distribution channel — the hotel is bookable through a distribution partner we trust to honour the rate and the reservation.
Seven checks, no exceptions — miss one and it doesn't make it onto Tribes.
The family voice in reviews.
Generic travel sites mix every kind of traveller into one review feed — couples on city breaks, business travellers, solo backpackers, families. The signal you need as a parent gets buried.
For every Tribes property with a meaningful family-review base, we isolate the reviews written by families with children. We then ask our review engine to do three things — grounded only in those family voices:
Summarise — what families consistently say.
Score sentiment — positive, mixed, or negative.
Surface three — the most useful family reviews to read.
“Kids club ran every afternoon, properly staffed, with separate groups for under-7s and older kids.”Family of four · July 2025 · Stayed 7 nights
Families' favourite.
A Families' favourite is a property listed on Tribes that, on top of meeting every criterion above, earns consistently positive reviews from family travelers. We read the family-only review summary, and only when it comes back positive or highly positive does the property become a Families' favourite.
In other words: a Families' favourite is where the on-paper case and the lived family experience both check out — not just a place that ticks the boxes, but one families come back praising.
The verification that started Tribes.
The single fact that brought Tribes into being: most hotels that advertise a "kids club" don't actually run one in any meaningful sense. They've ticked an amenity box, or they once had one, or they call a single playroom a club. The result is the most painful kind of family-trip surprise — the one you discover at check-in.
We inspect the hotel's own website for hard evidence.
Our verification engine searches the hotel's own official website to confirm a kids club actually exists — and to pull the detail families need: ages served, operating hours and prices. If the hotel itself hasn't documented it, it doesn't count.
We check the pictures to confirm it's real.
We inspect photos of the kids club to make sure it's a genuine, purpose-built club — not a single playroom or an amenity box ticked on a brochure.
We enrich with what families actually say.
When possible, we go further and add feedback on the kids club extracted from family reviews — the lived experience, on top of what the hotel documents.
Heritage Awali Golf & Spa Resort
Bel Ombre, Mauritius
Timomo Kids Club
Daytime supervised club
Sports, creative workshops, nature games, island picnics
“The Timomo Kids Club at Heritage Awali offers exciting activities for children, from creative workshops to adventure games. From morning till sunset, your children will embark on exciting adventures while we take care of every detail.”
Built on public, citable data.
For every region we cover, we build the destination guide on top of public, structured, open data — not anonymous travel-blog content. If we don't have enough evidence to make a confident claim, we leave the space blank rather than fill it with filler. Empty is more useful than wrong.
Geography.
Destination boundaries come from OpenStreetMap, the same global mapping project used by governments, navigation apps and emergency services. A precise, consistent definition of where a region begins and ends — and where each property actually sits.
Activities and places of interest.
Things to see and do are extracted from open sources, then matched against each other to remove duplicates and weed out low-quality entries before they ever reach a destination page.
The family lens, applied on top.
Each activity gets tagged for the ages it works for, the pace of the experience and the time of year that suits it. Not "the top ten things to do in X" — the ten things worth doing with your kids, in your kids' age range, in the month you're travelling.
Practical content.
Each destination page also includes — best months to visit, getting around, things to know before you go, the kids' activity highlights — generated from the data above and reviewed against our family lens before it goes live.
The open sources we build on:
Trust runs both ways.
The promises we make are only worth the things we refuse to do. Here's the second list — what won't happen on Tribes.
We don't list every hotel.
Tribes isn't trying to be the biggest catalogue — it's trying to be the most trustworthy one for families. Plenty of perfectly fine hotels won't appear here because they're not built for families.
We don't write hotel reviews ourselves.
Every word in our review summaries comes from real family travellers. We synthesise; we don't fabricate.
We don't accept payment for placement.
Families' favourite badges are earned through our criteria. Hotels can't buy their way in, and we won't take them down on request if the evidence stands.
We don't pretend to know what we don't know.
If verification came back inconclusive, we say so. If reviews are too sparse to be meaningful, we say so. We'd rather be honest about a gap than smooth it over.
The industry moves. So do we.
A kids club open last summer might close this season. A property might change ownership. So we rebuild on a rolling schedule — and if something on Tribes doesn't match what you find on the ground, tell us. We'll re-check.
Properties & amenities
Refreshed on a rolling schedule, with every region rebuilt periodically as new inventory and reviews come in.
Kids clubs
Re-verified during each regional refresh — primary-source check repeated end-to-end, not just spot-checked.
Destinations
Rebuilt as the underlying open-data sources update. Boundaries, activities and practical content all re-derived from source.
A family trip is one of the biggest discretionary purchases a household makes in a year — and the most emotionally loaded. The cost of getting it wrong isn't measured in money. It's measured in a five-year-old's meltdown on a beach you can't get back from.
We built Tribes because the existing tools weren't doing the homework. Now we do it, so you don't have to.
One more thing — for members.
The same curated, verified stays carry exclusive member rates — up to 15% below the public price. These come from non-public rates, the kind normally reserved for loyalty-programme members or people booking package holidays.
We're only allowed to pass these rates on as long as they stay inside our community — not posted on the open web. That's why we ask families to register on Tribes before we show the member price.
And it's quick: we simply verify your email and phone number — that's it. Verification gets you confidence; membership gets you the rate.
Got questions?
Want to know more about how we verify a specific property? Spotted something that doesn't match what you found on the ground? We want to hear about it.