Tauber's Bio-Vitalhotel was named a Finalist in the Best Sustainable Hotel - Europe category at the 2025 Travelling for Business Awards, recognition for the family-run South Tyrolean pioneer that put organic living at the heart of Alpine hospitality long before it was fashionable.
Set in Chienes in Italy's
Val Pusteria, between the Dolomites' drama and the orchard-soft valley floor, Tauber's has built its identity around the "Bio" in its name. The kitchen works to certified organic principles, drawing on regional farmers, Alpine herbs and the produce of a landscape that supplies genuine zero-kilometre flavour; menus honour South Tyrol's happy collision of Italian finesse and Tyrolean heartiness while treating provenance as non-negotiable. It is wellness cuisine in the truest sense - food that restores because of where it comes from, not despite it.
The vital half of the name is equally earned. Saunas, pools and treatments rooted in the Alpine tradition - hay, pine, mountain botanicals - offer the
original ritual heat experience that spa-seekers increasingly travel to the Alps to find, while the surrounding trails turn every stay into gentle prescription: walk, breathe, eat well, sleep deeply. For the stretched executives of the
Travelling for Business readership, it is a formula with measurable effects.
Family stewardship completes the case. Like the best of South Tyrol's hotels, Tauber's is run by its owners across generations, and the care shows in choices a corporation would not make: energy from renewable sources, building materials that belong to the valley, and a scale that keeps hospitality personal.
The 2025 title went to Gut Guntrams in Austria, with Tauber's shortlisted alongside Heckfield Place - an Alpine-and-Atlantic field united by the conviction that sustainability begins in the kitchen and the soil.
The setting multiplies the medicine. Val Pusteria places guests between the Kronplatz slopes and the
UNESCO-listed peaks of the Dolomites, so summer hiking and winter skiing bookend the sauna hours, while nearby villages supply the speck, cheeses and mountain wines that make South Tyrolean tables so beloved. It is a valley that has practised sustainable living for centuries; Tauber's simply gives it a warm bed and an exceptional kitchen.
As the Travelling for Business Awards look towards 2026, Tauber's Bio-Vitalhotel represents the South Tyrolean model at its best: organic before it was a movement, and hospitable in a way only families manage.
