Exito Travel takes the hassle out of flight bookings for tour operators and other travel companies, offering expert-managed air travel solutions so its partners can focus on creating exceptional trips. Now, through a partnership with Sustainable Travel International, Exito extends this same ease to carbon offsetting through its Planet Care program. This initiative makes it effortless for tour operators to address their flight emissions which are typically the largest portion of a trip’s climate impact. Offsetting offers an immediate, scalable solution that can be implemented today as aviation works toward the long-term goal of decarbonization. By handling the logistics, covering costs, and ensuring high-quality offsets, Exito enables tour operators to dedicate more time and resources to other aspects of sustainability.
The Challenge
More Than a Booking: Managing the Carbon Footprint of Flights
For many tour operators, flights are just another logistical piece—but for Exito Travel, they’re the gateway to an extraordinary journey. As a flight specialist, Exito partners with over 150 tour operators, travel advisors, and tourism companies to book and manage their guest’s air travel.
Unlike flight OTAs, Exito delivers a personalized, service-driven experience. Every booking is handled by an expert, not an algorithm, ensuring air travel is thoughtfully planned and tailored to each traveler’s needs. Exito ensures its partners don’t have to worry about air travel logistics or real-time support, allowing operators like Mountain Travel Sobek, ExperiencePlus!, and Outlier Journeys to focus on delivering incredible on-the-ground experiences.
Exito’s business revolves entirely around flights, positioning it within one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. Air travel is often the most carbon-intensive part of a trip, meaning the flights arranged by Exito account for a significant share of its clients’ emissions. While solutions like sustainable aviation fuel and electric aircraft exist, they are either not yet widely available or currently not viable for long-haul flights. With air travel projected to grow by 4.3% annually over the next two decades, its environmental impact will only increase.
Exito long recognized the importance of sustainability in travel and saw an opportunity to help its partners take action. In recent years, growing environmental awareness among travelers has pushed tour operators to meet rising demands for more sustainable travel. The pandemic served as a stark reminder of the world’s fragility, accelerating this shift. As the industry rebuilt, Exito knew it was time to turn ideas into action.
“Coming out of the pandemic, we challenged ourselves to be both a trusted partner in flight as well as a flight partner for the planet,” said Jim Kane, Exito’s Director of Sustainability and Outreach. This mindset drove Exito to emerge not just as a flight specialist, but as a leader in making sustainability more accessible for its clients.
Solution
Planet Care: Removing Barriers to Carbon-Neutral Flights
Sustainability is a complex challenge for tour operators, requiring them to balance multiple priorities, from responsible food sourcing to ethical wildlife experiences. Managing flight emissions adds yet another layer of difficulty. Exito set out to remove one barrier from this equation by making it automatic and cost-free for its clients to neutralize their flight emissions.
Exito recognized the urgency of taking immediate action and focused on existing solutions instead of waiting for future, “ideal” advancements. As Kane put it, “One of our sustainability pillars is ‘Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good.’” With net-zero aviation still a distant reality, carbon offsets remain the only scalable solution available today to help mitigate the climate impact of flying.
To make this vision a reality, Exito partnered with Sustainable Travel International to launch Planet Care—a program that seamlessly integrates carbon offsets into its flight services. As a company dedicated to thoughtful solutions, Exito recognized the importance of collaborating with a trusted partner with deep knowledge of climate solutions to ensure the program was credible and impactful.
"As flight specialists, our focus is a seamless air experience. For climate action, we trust Sustainable Travel International. They are engaged, transparent, and excel at storytelling, sharing the details and impact of every project within their portfolio.”
Tour operators can opt into the program, then Exito calculates the carbon emissions of all their travelers’ flights, purchasing high-quality offsets from Sustainable Travel International to make them carbon neutral. These offsets support Sustainable Travel International’s Climate Impact Portfolio, a diverse mix of verified projects spanning clean energy, forest conservation, blue carbon, and cutting-edge climate technology that prevent or remove emissions. Beyond the program for industry clients, Exito also offsets all flights booked by direct travelers at no additional cost, ensuring every journey gives back to the planet.
For tour operators, this approach offers a frictionless way to integrate sustainability without adding complexity for guests. As Kane put it, “We’ve made sustainability the default option. Travelers don’t need to make a choice or pay extra. We’ve taken that off their plate.”
“I’m a big believer that it’s on the businesses operating in this space to make the sustainable choice easy for travelers. The burden shouldn’t be on the client; it should be encompassed in what we offer.”
Impact
Scaling Impact Across the Travel Industry Through Ease and Credibility
Since launching Planet Care, Exito has offset more than 50 million air miles from over 4,000 travelers’ flights. That’s over 6,000 metric tons of CO2 – equivalent to taking 1,400 cars off the road for a year.
By fully covering costs and handling all the measurement and project logistics, Exito makes it effortless for its clients to integrate flight offsets into their sustainability efforts. By sharing both the financial and operational responsibility, Exito frees up tour operators to focus their time and resources on strengthening other aspects of their trips’ environmental and social impact.
Maria Elena Price, co-owner of ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours shared how the program helped her company take action on its biggest environmental impact by eliminating the burden of managing flight emissions.“One of our company goals is to have as much of a positive impact as possible, but If I had to calculate the flight emissions for everyone, that’s not the best use of my time,” she explained. “This helped us – it was a good way to start tackling the big elephant in the room, which, in our world is flights.”
Exito wanted to ensure that its offsets deliver real, measurable impact. By partnering with Sustainable Travel International, Exito and its clients gain transparency into the projects they support, ensuring their offsets drive meaningful change. Emily Carson, Director of Sales & Guest Services for MT Sobek, another one of Exito’s tour operator clients, emphasized how this partnership further alleviates the challenges of managing carbon offsets independently. She noted that doing it alone would be “complex, requiring significant research, partnerships, and ongoing administration” to properly vet projects and ensure credibility.
“Exito’s Planet Care Program simplifies the process, ensuring that offsets are high quality, properly vetted, and seamlessly integrated into our travel services. This allows us to focus on crafting adventures while knowing that our carbon mitigation efforts are in expert hands.”
Beyond Mitigation: Flights as a Force for Good
Beyond mitigating the harmful effects of carbon emissions, Exito prioritizes initiatives that create positive change. Its offsets support high-impact projects that extend beyond carbon reduction, contributing to biodiversity conservation, community development, and climate resilience. For example, through the Keo Seima carbon offset project, Exito and its Planet Care participants help protect a culturally significant forest for Indigenous communities while safeguarding habitats for endangered species, including elephants and gibbons.
Exito’s sustainability commitment also goes beyond offsets. As a member of 1% for the Planet, it pledges at least 1% of its annual revenue to vetted environmental organizations. It also awards impact flight grants to accelerate the work of leading conservationists, including an NGO focused on regenerative ocean cultivation.
By integrating sustainability into its services and providing tour operators with a streamlined solution, Exito demonstrates that climate action in aviation is possible today. Looking ahead, Exito remains committed to scaling its impact by engaging more tourism companies in sustainability and expanding initiatives that drive positive environmental and social change.
50
Million air miles offset from 4,000+ travelers’ flights.
6,000+
Metric tons of CO2 reduced or removed from the atmosphere
16
Climate projects supported through Planet Care
Company
Exito Travel
Company Type
Flight Specialist
Partnership Dates
2022 - Present
Solutions Used
Carbon Neutral Flights
