Booking.com moves towards prioritizing third-party certifications in its commitment to make more sustainable travel choices easier for everyone

30 March, 2024

Reaffirming Booking.com’s commitment to showcase more sustainable travel options to all of its customers, and to help support accommodation partners on actions they can take to operate more sustainably, today the leading digital travel platform has announced some updates to how it will display more sustainable choices to travelers around the world, focusing on third-party certifications. 

Booking.com will now introduce a label to acknowledge when a property has achieved a third-party sustainability certification coupled with the ability to filter searches accordingly. To date, over 16,500 properties have a third-party sustainability certification displayed on the platform. Moving forward, the Travel Sustainable name, logo and levels will no longer be displayed. 

Sustainability is a core component of Booking.com’s mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world, and over the past decade the company has been shaping its work in this space. Booking.com’s approach continues to be developed in consultation with independent experts and organizations such as the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC) and UN Tourism, striving to explore how best to address some of the challenges travelers face in making more sustainable choices. The goal is to find new ways to help bridge the gap between the number of accommodations with third-party certifications and the breadth of choice available in the market, encouraging accommodation partners to progress towards third-party certification. 

Partners will continue to be supported as they progress with tailored educational resources, from a wealth of informative materials on the company’s Partner Hub, including a handbook on more sustainable hospitality, to online courses developed in partnership with UN Tourism. On their individual property listings, partners will also be able to indicate practices they have adopted across categories including water, food waste, energy, plastic and local community, helping travelers understand the efforts underway.

The broader sustainability space has developed significantly in recent years, particularly the regulatory environment, which has been evolving to reflect the central role that sustainability now has in business operations across all industries, alongside growing consumer expectations around the clarity, availability and veracity of information they receive on sustainability. 

In the context of those shifts and in anticipation of relevant legislation coming into place, the updates introduced today represent an evolution in how Booking.com recognizes more sustainable choices - but its commitment to making it easier for travelers to make more sustainable travel choices by supporting accommodations to operate more sustainably remains unwavering. Booking.com will continue to explore the most impactful role it can play in this space, maintaining its support of its partners, customers and the broader industry as they collaboratively strive to make more sustainable travel the way everyone can experience the world.

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