Introduction

In late 2025, IOL was selected to develop Zircuvia — a smart circular tourism platform for Puerto Princesa City, Palawan — as part of the UNDP EU-Philippines Green Economy Partnership's Circular Solutions Innovation Challenge.

It's one of the most complex projects we've taken on. Not because of the technology, but because of what the technology had to do — change the way tourists interact with a destination, and give local businesses and government a tool to measure and promote sustainable practices at the same time.
This is the story of how we built it.

The Problem We Were Solving

Puerto Princesa is one of the Philippines' most visited destinations. It's also one of the most environmentally sensitive — home to the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and a city that has built its identity around responsible tourism.

The challenge wasn't attracting more visitors. It was making sure tourism contributed to the local economy and environment rather than extracting from it. Local businesses practicing sustainable operations had no way to signal that to tourists. Tourists had no way to find and choose those businesses deliberately. And the LGU had no data to measure whether circular tourism practices were actually being adopted.
Zircuvia was designed to close all three of those gaps in one platform.

Going to the Ground First

Before writing a single line of code, we went to Puerto Princesa.

In March 2026, the IOL team conducted a field visit covering 14 stakeholder engagements across the city — talking to local business owners, LGU officials, tourism officers, and community leaders. We visited accommodations, restaurants, tour operators, and sustainability advocates to understand how the circular economy actually worked on the ground, not just in theory.

What we found changed how we designed the product. The businesses most committed to sustainable practices were often the least equipped to communicate that to visitors. Some didn't have websites. Many weren't on major booking platforms. A few had certifications they'd earned but had no way to surface to tourists making decisions on their phones.

The 14 engagements gave us something more valuable than user research — they gave us a clear picture of the real barriers between intention and behavior for both businesses and tourists.

What We Built

Zircuvia is a Progressive Web App — which means it works on any device through a browser, with no app store download required. That was a deliberate choice. For a tourism app targeting both local businesses and international visitors, friction at the point of first use had to be as close to zero as possible.

The platform has three core functions:

1. For tourists, it's a discovery tool – a way to find and select businesses that have been verified for sustainable and circular practices. It’s a filter for the conscious traveler who wants their dollars to match their values.

2. It’s a visibility platform for local businesses, a way to highlight sustainable practices, gain recognition and attract the growing segment of tourists seeking them out.

3. For the LGU and partners like UNDP, it's a data layer — a way to track adoption of circular economy practices across the tourism sector, measure impact, and make evidence-based decisions about where to invest and what to promote.

The Design Challenge

Building for three very different user types on a single platform is always a design challenge. A tourist making a split-second decision about where to eat needs a completely different interface from an LGU officer reviewing sustainability metrics.

We handled this through a role-based architecture — the same platform presents differently depending on who's using it and why. Tourists get a clean, visual discovery experience. Businesses get a dashboard for managing their profile and sustainability indicators. Government users get reporting views and aggregate data.
The visual design was built around Puerto Princesa's identity — greens, earthy tones, and imagery that reflects the natural environment the platform is designed to protect. It should feel like it belonged to the place, not like a generic SaaS product dropped into a new context.

What's Next?

Zircuvia is currently in its final development and testing phase. The platform will be demonstrated at the UNDP EU-Philippines Green Economy Partnership Demo Day in June 2026 — where it will be presented alongside other circular economy solutions developed under the same program.

Beyond Demo Day, the vision is for Zircuvia to expand beyond Puerto Princesa to other LGUs across the Philippines that are building sustainable tourism programs. The architecture was designed with that scale in mind from the start.

A Note on Why This Project Matters to Us

IOL is a software studio based in Baguio City — a city that has had its own complicated relationship with tourism, environmental pressure, and the challenge of managing growth sustainably. This project isn't abstract for us. The questions Zircuvia is trying to answer are ones we've seen play out in our own community.

Building technology that helps a destination protect what makes it worth visiting — that's the kind of work we started IOL to do.

If you're an LGU or tourism organization exploring digital tools for sustainable tourism, we'd love to talk. Reach out to the IOL team at info@iol.ph.