The Travalyst Coalition, a global partnership founded by The Duke of Sussex together with leading brands Booking.com, Skyscanner, Tripadvisor, Trip.com and Visa, announced the development of draft sustainability frameworks to serve as a cross-channel guide for scoring sustainability practices across the travel and tourism industry. The first three frameworks for accommodation, aviation and experiences are being developed building upon existing standards, with the goal of making them easier to understand for consumers and businesses, and implement and scale across the broadest possible range of travel service providers.
“We know from our research that 82% of our accommodation partners are interested in collaborating with us on the topic of sustainability and that 87% of global travelers think that’s it’s important to consider sustainable properties when travelling,” said Gillian Tans, Chairwoman of Booking.com. “Despite this tremendous interest on both sides, the majority of consumers still don’t know where to start. Even though 70% say that they’d be more likely to book a stay that was eco-friendly, we also see that 72% of travelers aren’t even aware of the existence of eco-labels. This represents a huge opportunity for us as part of Travalyst to help a wider range of accommodation providers showcase their sustainability efforts and in turn make it easier for travelers to find and ultimately book their properties.”
These frameworks will serve as the foundation for an eventual scoring system that would be recognizable by anyone booking holidays and trips across all platforms. The goal is to highlight travel providers with strong sustainability practices already in place and offer people an easy way to understand and identify more sustainable travel options.
The implementation of these frameworks will also act as encouragement for further industry-wide adoption through ongoing outreach, feedback and improvement. These and all future efforts of the Travalyst coalition are being undertaken with strategic guidance from a newly appointed independent advisory group of leading sustainability and travel experts. The initial draft frameworks are being presented for feedback in a series of local industry roundtables and workshops in Scotland at the end of this month.
