Booking Holdings released its 2020 Sustainability Report
The Booking Holdings 2020 Sustainability Report provides an update on the progress of the company’s sustainability and corporate social responsibility activities from 2020. It includes the results of Booking.com’s 2020 research on sustainable travel: « 2020 Sustainable Travel Insights ». The report contains information and data on different aspects of Booking Holdings’ business and the operations taking place across its primary consumer-facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, KAYAK and OpenTable.
2020 Sustainable Travel Insights
In 2020, Booking.com conducted research on sustainable travel. While 2020 was an unprecedented year for the travel industry and travelers, the research reveals travelers have the ambition and willingness to make more sustainable travel decisions in the future.
« I think collaboration is our biggest opportunity in the travel industry, working together to tackle the big questions and putting aside commercial competition when it comes to addressing bigger-picture challenges such as climate change, waste, nature and culture conservation, social equality and equitable wealth distribution. To do this, we need to give consumers more options, more meaningful and trustworthy information, and tools that they can use to make good travel decisions. Then we can turn these big challenges into simple steps that everyone can use to improve how they travel – such as traveling light, with trust, slowly and carefully – then, collectively, we can make major changes.”
– Dr. Anna Spenceley (Board member of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council and chair of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group)
Facilitating Sustainable Travel
As a company, Booking Holdings believes that it has a responsibility to help ensure the world remains worth experiencing and to promote a more sustainable travel industry — culturally, environmentally, and socioeconomically. If done with respect for the world’s local communities, environments, and biodiversity, travel can broaden horizons, reduce barriers and bring people closer together.
To make sustainable travel choices easier for everyone, Booking Holdings is focusing its efforts on two key areas that ultimately rely on each other to succeed:
1. Supporting the company’s partners to become more sustainable, which in turn increases the number of sustainable travel offerings; and
2. Supporting the company’s customers to make sustainable choices.
Read the full report
Booking Holdings 2020 Sustainability Report (March 2021)
Become a Sustainable Accommodation
Increasingly, travelers and fellow travel provider clients are seeking confirmation that sustainability practices are in place.
Sustainability certification for accommodations is a voluntary, third-party assessment through an audit to ensure compliance with sustainable tourism standards. GSTC does not certify directly. Certification is conducted by Certification Bodies (CB) while GSTC provides an accreditation program through its partner Assurance Services International to accredit Certification Bodies.
Accommodations certified by a GSTC-Accredited CB can use the GSTC logo along with the CB’s mark. The logos are also shared with OTAs and other buyers of hotel space.
Learn more about how to become certified as a sustainable accommodation.
