Meals and Sleeping Conditions of the porters; The biggest difference between a responsible company and an irresponsible one is how they look after their porters on the trek. Many porters are given very little to eat on the trail. They have to wait to see how much the tourists have eaten before the left-overs are divided up amongst them. Many porters end the trail tired and hungry.
In general porters sleep together in the group dining and kitchen tents. This is fine since there is warmth in numbers. However, when you are on the Inca Trail remember not end up talking all night in the dining tent as there may be tired and cold porters outside waiting to go to bed. You may also notice that very few dining tents have integral floors to keep out the cold and damp. When it rains the floor can become like a river running through the tent.
Very few porters have sleeping mats or even warm sleeping bags. They usually put one blanket on the ground and cover themselves with another one. There is still plenty of room for improvement for even the most expensive and professional trekking companies when it comes to providing warm, comfortable and dry accommodation for their porters.
Lack of proper resting conditions
Porters on the Inca Trail are the first people to get up in the morning and the last ones to go to sleep. Despite all of this, they do not receive proper camping tents, let alone sleeping bags and sleeping pads. Porters sleep in the dining tents that tourists use for dining, these tents do not have a waterproof floor, and their roofs leak when the rains are heavy or when it rains for longer than a couple of hours. To make up for the lack of a waterproof floor, they spread a tarp on the floor that with a bit of luck might keep them dry, but most of the times they would have to stay awake during the night, sleep sitting up, or find an unusual shelter in the park’s bathrooms.