Key points
- Green Flag Trails is a trail quality framework managed by the World Trails Network (WTN).
- It certifies that a trail is accurately described: difficulty, safety, environmental responsibility and marketing.
- Wild Guanabana’s auditors are accredited Green Flag Trails auditors, and our audits follow the framework.
- Hiking difficulty is graded on three scales: physical effort, terrain and risk.
A visitor who reads that a trail is “easy, 6 km, two hours” makes decisions on that promise. They choose their shoes, their water, the time they set off, and whether to bring their children. If the promise is wrong, the trail is not just disappointing. It can be unsafe. That is why Wild Guanabana audits every trail it designs against an international framework rather than our own opinion.
What is Green Flag Trails?
Green Flag Trails is a quality framework managed by the World Trails Network, the global community of trail organisations of which Wild Guanabana is a long-standing member. It is not a construction standard. It is a process for auditing a trail against selected criteria, and it acts as a certification of accuracy and accountability: does the trail provide the experience it claims to provide? That covers safety and difficulty, environmental responsibility and the accuracy of the information visitors are given.
For a young trail destination this matters a great deal. Saudi Arabia is still new to many global adventure markets, and a recognised quality label tells international hikers that what they read is what they will find. When we wrote our recommendations for AlUla in 2024, no trail in the Middle East had yet been Green Flag certified. The first destination to do it gains a clear position in the global trails community.
How we grade difficulty
Our hiking audits follow the Green Flag Trails approach and grade every trail on three separate scales, each from 1 (easy) to 5 (challenging):
- Physical effort, from the length and the total uphill. A grade 1 trail is up to about 3 km with very little climbing; a grade 5 trail is over 15 km with more than 10% of its length uphill.
- Terrain, from the surface and the skills it asks for: from even ground you can walk with your hands in your pockets, to long stretches of very rough ground and scrambling.
- Risk, from loose footing, exposure and claustrophobic or hazardous sections, from none at all to long exposed stretches.
Keeping the three apart is the point. A short trail can still be risky; a long one can be gentle underfoot. Visitors get an honest picture, and destinations can build a network with the right mix of easy, moderate and demanding trails. For cycling we use the International Trail Rating System (ITRS).
From audit to certification
An audit is only useful if it leads to action. We divide each trail into segments, grade each one and log every intervention the trail needs, with a unique ID, a GPS position and a photograph. That list becomes the brief for the trail builders and, later, the evidence a destination needs if it chooses to seek Green Flag certification for its network or for a few hero trails.
Wild Guanabana’s lead auditors are Bashir Daoud and Fivos Tsaravopoulos. Fivos is an accredited Green Flag Trails auditor and sits on the board of the World Trails Network. Between them they have audited thousands of kilometres of trail in AlUla, NEOM and Greece.
Why it matters to the people who commission trails
A standard protects the investment. It gives tourism authorities and developers a shared language with their consultants, their builders and their marketing teams. It also gives them something they can show their board and their visitors: an independent framework, applied consistently, on every trail.
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