Context. Episodic accretion plays an important role in the evolution of young stars. Although it has been under investigation for a long time, the origin of such episodic accretion events is not yet understood.

Aims. We investigate the dust and gas emission of a sample of young outbursting sources in the infrared to get a better understanding of their properties and circumstellar material, and we use the results in a further work to model the objects.

Methods. We used Herschel data, from our PI program of 12 objects and complemented with archival observations to obtain the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and spectra of our targets. We report here the main characteristics of our sample, focussing on the SED properties and on the gas emission lines detected in the PACS and SPIRE spectra.

Results. The SEDs of our sample show the diversity of the outbursting sources, with several targets showing strong emission in the far-infrared from the embedded objects. Most of our targets reside in a complex environment, which we discuss in detail. We detected several atomic and molecular lines, in particular rotational CO emission from several transitions from J = 38−37 to J = 4−3. We constructed rotational diagrams for the CO lines, and derived in three domains of assumed local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) temperatures and column densities, ranging mainly between 0−100 K and 400−500 K. We confirm correlation in our sample between intense CO J = 16−15 emission and the column density of the warm domain of CO, N(warm). We notice a strong increase in luminosity of HH 381 IRS and a weaker increase for PP 13 S, which shows the beginning of an outburst.