Sally didn't think it was a real thing. She received a phone call from someone claiming to be from the office of the Duke of Sussex and asking if she would come to meet with him about a travel initiative he was considering.
She found out that the call was legit. Representatives from Booking.com, Visa, Skyscanner, and Ctrip joined her at the table.
She was blown away by the prince's knowledge of travel and his desire to create a sustainable rating system that could be used across their platforms and others.
Although there was no lack of well-intentioned initiatives and good efforts in tourism, there wasn't a shared understanding about how good is. Operators and travelers were confused by the many different labels and schemes bandied about to assess sustainable tourism.
The prince felt the group could work together to create a credible program, but he shared concerns about potential challenges. Is it possible for these brands to work together? Is it possible that they could produce results instead of just talking and making pledges? They could bring reliable data about sustainable living into the mainstream.
Three years ago, this happened. He is now the CEO of the effort. The original five companies are joined by two others. Darrell Wade is the chairman of the group and a leader in sustainable practices.
As always, Prince Harry is involved. "He understands what's going on." His knowledge about travel sustainable topics is very deep. There's a broad spectrum of issues impacted by a range of factors and he understands that as president of African Parks.
Prince Harry convened a group of 50 researchers to look into the topic, and they created a file this size, with him reading every single page and writing notes on every single page.
The pilot program ended three weeks ago.
She said that they proved that they could get these guys around a table and have them play nicely together.
What has been done?
"We call it a framework, it's a unified framework for reportingsustainability."
Two parts make up the framework. There is a list of attributes that need to be collected in order to calculate a score. The methodology is used to assess the attributes.
You would collect information about energy and water usage from a hotel as well as policies for their employees, community engagement, etc. The methodology spits out a calculation for a hotel after being applied. A score forsustainability on a flight is based on an emissions calculation.
The hotel attributes that were taken into consideration are listed on the hotel page.
Depending on the platform, you might see a label that says that this property has a travel sustainable badge because it achieved a suitable threshold The same framework is used on all of our partners' sites. Consumers will see the same information no matter where they are looking or booking.
She plans to make it open source so that anyone can use it. "On the aviation side, it's already underway, so that anyone can take it and plug it in, completely free of charge."
In the near future, other partners are going to roll these out on their websites.
She expects to make announcements about additional partners when she addresses the European conference of the Global Business Travel Association in Brussels next month. She sees companies from small to large incorporating the framework.
Although the initial focus is on aviation and hospitality, a goal is to involve tour operators as both partners and subjects of evaluation.
There is a road map for growth.
This sounds very hopeful. I raised a concern that something had undermined the various badges and certifications that appeared during the Pandemic and which were supposed to certify that a hotel, airline or even a destination was "covid-safe." The WTTC's program relied on self- reporting rather than an independent audit. I wanted to know how Travalyst was able to determine sustainable while also protecting against greenwashing.
Longfield acknowledged that the company relies on properties self- reporting. She said that their partners have the chance to tackle these issues at scale for the first time. The high volume of bookings as well as moderation is being harnessed. We will continue to evolve these systems to make it easier to include proof points for certain sustainable practices, such as energy bills and certification data.
There is still a clear role for auditing and certification, but we need to solve the scale problem.
I was publisher of hotels in the U.S. and UK. One used a scale from 1 to 10 and the other assigned categories that tour operators use when building itineraries. Human correspondents assigned 1 to 5 stars to each hotel they visited.
The range of factors that could limit what a fine hotel could offer was the most difficult part of establishing criteria. If we decided that a property needed to have a swimming pool in order to be considered a five-star hotel, it would eliminate the great hotels in Manhattan.
I think it would be important for a hotel in Los Angeles to conserve water but not important for a castle in Scotland. How can a technical solution accurately evaluate the many different conditions in different locations?
This is exactly what our methodology does, and I couldn't disagree more. It takes variations into account, not just geographically but also based on lodging type, because you can't compare a lodge to a hotel. It's an important point and a lot of people don't know about it. All that complexity has to live behind the scenes in order to be accounted for.
It has been a long time since the search for a unified vision to assesssustainability. Ted Turner formed the Global Partnership for sustainable tourism criteria. The goal of the partnership was to reduce the confusion caused by the hundreds of competing sustainable certification programs that existed 13 years ago.
Turner wants a framework that will give a universal understanding and application of sustainable travel practices. The steering committee was made up of major travel companies.
If sustainable tourism certification came to fruition, defining terms for it would be a very big deal.
It didn't work out as planned. The criteria weren't universally applied.
The drive to be inclusive was doomed by the fact that drafts went to 80,000 people before a document was produced.
I said at the time that the report was mostly bone and little meat. It didn't have data based guidelines to measure compliance. The expression of too many points of view made subsequent meetings unfocused.
Prince Harry started this with just five partners and built a pilot to see if they could work together.
I hope that what we are seeing is a very big deal. I'll be watching this program the most because it's one of the many programs that have come to my attention.
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