´Through its focus on preserving the cultural and ecological integrity of Asturias while creating enriching and respectful interactions for travellers, IntoAsturias stands out as a model of sustainable tourism rooted in community values and environmental stewardship´.
EU-funded TRACE project Best Practices report, June 2025
Responsible and sustainable travel is at the heart of everything we do.
In practice, this means that we aim to maximize the positive effects that tourism can have on individuals, local communities, and wildlife in Northern Spain while minimizing the negative social, environmental and economic impacts.
These are the three main areas where we put Sustainable Travel into practice:
1. Sustainable Partnerships
- We prefer to work with locally owned businesses reflecting the local culture (small-scale hotels, lodges, casas rurales, agrotourism accommodations, restaurants, local artists, and local bakeries).
- We work with wildlife guides that are certified in eco-tourism. They provide expert local insight, prevent environmental harm, and offer safe and educational outdoor experiences.
- We provide Codes of Good Practices about Wildlife Viewing, Hiking and Visiting Heritage Sites to the guides that we are working with. This collaboration means high quality experiences for our guests across the board.
- We are part of the Proyecto Corredor de Ecoturismo, an ecotourism corridor across northern Spain. This means we ensure your trip respects the natural environment and supports local communities.
- We financially support environmental NGO’s, more concretely, SEO Birdlife, which is the Spanish branch of Birdlife International. As a result, our visitors have the chance to observe Spanish birdlife such as the alpine finch in Picos de Europa National Park.
2. Involving our travelers
- All travel information is sent digitally to our travelers. The travel itinerary can be put in an app on their smartphone or saved as a PDF. In addition to saving paper, this allows us to include any changes in the trip in real-time, updated directly on the traveler’s app.
- We always include suggestions on Sustainable Travel in Northern Spain in the travel documents we send to our clients. We recommend avoiding single-use plastics, taking public transport, and leave-no-trace principles. Check out our Sustainable Travel Tips in Northern Spain!
- We recommend locally produced and/or vegetarian and vegan options in all our destinations.
- We compensate the carbon footprint of our travelers with public transport itineraries through Northern Spain.
3. In our office
- We reduce waste (e.g. paper) and recycle (e.g. plastic, paper, glass).
intoAsturias´ Environmental Education activity in 2023 - We measure our use of energy and water and look for ways to reduce them.
- We invested over 3000 EUR in a community-owned solar panel project in Spain (Parque de Torrontera) to compensate for our electricity use and even generate more green energy than we consume ourselves.
- We purchase local products (KM 0) where we can.
- We limit the use of small packaging, especially plastic.
- We organize an Environmental Education Day for children and their parents living in the vicinity of our office at least once a year.
- We communicate on our achievements against our sustainable goals once a year through reporting (see below).
- We measure our achievements and monitor our progress using the Travelife Action Planning Tool.
Our efforts towards Sustainable Travel in Northern Spain have led to obtaining the Travelife Certified Award: 
intoAsturias has achieved Travelife Certified recognition. Travelife Certified is the highest recognition level within the internationally recognised Travelife sustainability programme for tour operators and travel agents. Travelife Certified recognition is awarded following a comprehensive independent on-site audit based on the Travelife Certified Standard.
We comply with more than 200 mandatory sustainability criteria covering areas including environmental management, climate action, biodiversity, working conditions, human rights, local communities, sustainable supply chain management, customer communication, and responsible business practices. To maintain this recognition, our company is recertified every two years to verify that we continue to comply with the requirements of the Travelife Certified Standard.
More information about the Travelife programme, the different recognition levels, the validity of our current Travelife Certified recognition, the assessment process, and the publicly available Travelife criteria can be found here.
As part of the Travelife Certification, we drafted a Sustainability Policy. This policy addresses issues that we have already managed, what we are currently doing, and what we hope to achieve in the future. It defines practices at the core of intoAsturias´product development, operations, and external partner relationships.
You can read our full Sustainability Policy here:
Sustainability Policy of intoAsturias
This Sustainability Policy outlines our plans in terms of sustainability issues for the period 2023-2025.
Last updated: July 23, 2026