Portugal small group holiday with added comfort

Planet

We provide training to trip leaders on water consumption best practices and how to encourage their travellers to follow these principles too. As tap water is generally safe to drink in Portugal, we encourage travellers to bring a reusable water bottle that they can refill throughout the trip. This reduces the number of single-use plastic water bottles disposed of by our travellers. We continue to work with local suppliers on water management initiatives. For example, encouraging hotel owners to provide water refill stations, and in-room signage requesting short showers, repeated towel use and turning taps off.

Where possible we choose to travel by land rather than air. By minimizing the use of flights on our trips, we are making journeys more stimulating and more sustainable for travellers. This trip through Portugal does not include any flights, providing all transport by private vehicle, boat and train. We ensure our vehicles are fuel-efficient and well maintained with regular servicing. We use vehicles that are an appropriate size to suit the group size. For example, we wouldn’t use a 16-seater van if we only had five people travelling with us. We optimize our driving routes to reduce travel time and our carbon footprint, and we turn the engine off when travellers are visiting a site and not in the vehicle.

People

Our trips maximize the opportunity for travellers to engage meaningfully with local culture and communities. Many experiences on our trips also support traditional cultural practices – whether artisanal, culinary or otherwise. In turn, this helps to sustain and preserve these traditional practices so that future generations may continue to learn, enjoy and benefit from them. This trip includes a fado performance in Coimbra. Fado can be traced back to the early 1800s and is commonly considered to be Portugal’s version of the blues. The songs are characterised by their mournful stories of the sea or the lives of the poor, and hearing it performed live is an experience to remember.

We go direct to the source for many of the inclusions on our trips. Locally-owned accommodation, transport providers, activity suppliers. This ensures that income from tourism is directly benefitting local communities everywhere we go. This trip includes dinners in Lisbon and Porto in locally-owned restaurants. A Douro Valley winery will provide not just wine tastings, but a lunch of locally-sourced regional specialties. Travellers will spend a day in Matosinhos, a fishing town near Porto, spreading the economic benefits of tourism to communities not commonly visited by tourists.