We are proud to announce that Lisbon Sintra Tours has been recognised by the LUX Global Excellence Awards 2025 — one of the most respected accolades in the international luxury travel and lifestyle industry. This year, we have been honoured with not one but two distinctions:
- Best Bespoke Private Tour Operator 2025 — Portugal
- Tailor-Made Cultural Travel Excellence Award 2025 — Portugal
For everyone on the Lisbon Sintra Tours team — our guides, our drivers, our planners, and everyone behind the scenes who pours care into every single itinerary — this recognition means a great deal. It is a reflection of the trust our guests place in us, and the standard we hold ourselves to each and every day.
What Are the LUX Global Excellence Awards?
The LUX Global Excellence Awards are published annually by LUXlife Magazine, a leading international publication dedicated to luxury living, travel, and lifestyle. The awards programme evaluates businesses across more than 60 countries, identifying those that demonstrate consistent excellence, innovation, and an unwavering commitment to the client experience.
Unlike many industry awards that rely on public voting alone, the LUX Global Excellence Awards combine editorial research, client feedback, and expert assessment to ensure that every winner genuinely earns its distinction. Recipients are not simply nominated — they are assessed across a range of criteria including quality of service, depth of expertise, personalisation, and overall guest experience.
To receive even one LUX Global Excellence Award is a significant achievement. To receive two in the same year, in the same country category, is something we are genuinely humbled by.
Best Bespoke Private Tour Operator 2025 — Portugal
The Best Bespoke Private Tour Operator award acknowledges tour companies that go beyond fixed itineraries and package products to deliver something genuinely tailored to each individual guest. It is an award that recognises the philosophy behind what we do just as much as the practical results.
At Lisbon Sintra Tours, "bespoke" is not a marketing word — it is how we work. Every private tour we design begins with a conversation. We want to know who you are: whether you are a history enthusiast who could spend hours in a single palace, a food lover who wants to eat where the locals eat, a family balancing curious children with a limited window of attention, or a couple celebrating a milestone anniversary who want the day to feel effortless and memorable.
From that conversation, we build an itinerary that fits — not a template with your name added at the top, but a genuine plan designed around your pace, your interests, and your priorities. If you want to skip the most visited sites entirely and spend your afternoon in a quiet village in the hills above Sintra, we will take you there. If you want to combine a morning at the palaces with an afternoon wine tasting in the Setúbal Peninsula, we will design exactly that.
Our guides are deeply knowledgeable about the regions they cover — not just the historical facts, but the stories behind the stories, the characters who shaped the landscape, and the quiet corners that most visitors never find. They are also, without exception, excellent company.
Being named Portugal's Best Bespoke Private Tour Operator for 2025 is a recognition of this approach — and a validation of every hour spent crafting itineraries that treat each guest as an individual.
Tailor-Made Cultural Travel Excellence Award 2025 — Portugal
The Tailor-Made Cultural Travel Excellence Award speaks to something else: the depth of the cultural experience we aim to provide. Portugal is a country of extraordinary richness — Moorish fortresses, Manueline architecture, Atlantic-facing villages, centuries of maritime history, a living tradition of fado, and a food culture that has never needed to borrow from anywhere else. It rewards the traveller who takes time to understand it.
Cultural travel done well is not about ticking sites off a list. It is about context. It is about arriving at Sintra's Pena Palace and understanding why King Ferdinand II — a German-born romantic who fell in love with Portugal — chose this hilltop and built something so deliberately fantastical. It is about standing at Cabo da Roca and feeling the weight of what it meant, five hundred years ago, to sail west from the edge of the known world. It is about sitting down to a meal in the Alentejo and understanding why the bread, the olive oil, and the wine all taste of this particular soil and this particular sun.
This award recognises our commitment to that kind of depth. Our itineraries are designed not just to move guests between beautiful places, but to leave them with a richer understanding of where they have been — and, often, a desire to return.
We pair this cultural depth with the ease and comfort that private travel affords. You travel at your own pace. You have a guide entirely dedicated to your group. There are no strangers crowding your viewpoint, no rushed departures because the bus is leaving, no compromises. The combination of genuine cultural insight and the flexibility of a fully private experience is, we believe, what sets truly excellent travel apart.
A Team Effort
Awards like these are never the achievement of one person. They are the result of a team of people who share a common standard and a genuine love for Portugal and for the craft of showing it to others.
We are grateful to every guide who has gone above and beyond. To every driver who ensured a seamless, comfortable journey. To the planners who have patiently reworked itineraries at short notice to accommodate changing plans. And above all, to the guests who have trusted us with their precious holiday time — who have taken a chance on a private tour and told their friends about the experience afterwards. Without that trust, nothing else is possible.
What This Means for Travellers Planning a Visit to Portugal
If you are planning a trip to Lisbon, Sintra, or anywhere across Portugal and you are considering a private tour, these awards offer an independent confirmation of what our past guests have told us for years: that Lisbon Sintra Tours consistently delivers an experience worth the investment.
Whether you are visiting Portugal for the first time and want an expert to help you make the most of limited time, or you are returning and want to go deeper into the corners you missed on a previous trip, we would love to plan something for you.
Our private tours cover a wide range of experiences — from full-day Sintra tours and Lisbon city explorations to day trips to Óbidos, Évora, the Douro Valley, the Alentejo, and beyond. Every tour can be shaped around your group, your interests, and your schedule.
Portugal deserves to be experienced properly. We would be honoured to show you how.