Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, will lead a global sustainable travel initiative to bring companies, consumers and communities together,e is to announce on Tuesday in Amsterdam.
The initiative, called Travalyst,as been in the works for three years, Kensington Palace said. The duke began engaging in conversations with the travel industry in 2017, and the first official partnership meeting took place in January with a group of travel companies including Booking.com, Ctrip, Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and Visa, in hopes of making the tourism industry more environmentally responsible.
“As tourism inevitably grows, it is critically important to accelerate the adoption of sustainable practices worldwide; and to balance this growth with the needs of the environment and the local population,” the duke said in a statement.
Travalyst comes at a time when airlines and cruise companies, along with restaurant and hotel companies, are grappling with how to make the travel industry less damaging to the environment. It also comes weeks after the duke and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, came under fire for traveling on private jets, which have a greater relative carbon impacthan commercial planes.
The consortium aims to educate people about sustainable travel and make it easier for them to understand whether their own travels are helping or hurting the planet and who is benefiting from travel dollars.
“We want to make sustainability a priority across the entire travel experience,” said Gillian Tans,ooking.com’s chairwoman. “Another goal is how to minimize the environmental footprint of travel, and the other goal is to protect and preserve local environments, welfare and cultural heritage and help to improve the welfare of local people for the longer term.”
Increasingly,eople expectravel companies to offer more sustainable options and want the money they spend on tourism to go back into the local communities they visit, and that’s where Travalyst will come in, the organizers said.