She’s Prince Harry’s right-hand woman in the fight to combat climate change, yet you’d be forgiven for not being immediately familiar with Sally Davey and her work.

But as chief executive of the Duke of Sussex’s Travalyst charity, she is poised to play an important and influential part in travel’s journey towards a more sustainable and equitable future – and she’s certain agents will be central to this transition.

Agents, she says, can – and should – play a prominent role in helping travel become a net-positive industry, serving as a conduit for holidaymakers anxious to know they are doing the right thing as we all become increasingly aware of the impact our travel has on people and planet.

For Davey, agents will get out of this two-way relationship as much as they put in; by helping travellers make better choices, they differentiate their service. Promoting more conscious travel then, in turn, drives a competitive advantage.

It’s after several months’ back-and-forth that TTG finally catches up with Davey, who has only given a handful of interviews since she joined the non-profit in May 2020. I start with the obvious question – why?

“With a founder like Prince Harry, we could be out every day making a lot of noise – but there is enough noise already and we don’t want to add to that,” she explains. “We’ve been deliberately quiet, working and building accountability so when we do start sharing what we’re doing, it has value.”

Davey reveals she decided to join Travalyst after an enlightening encounter with the duke in 2019. Davey, who was then TripAdvisor’s senior global director for industry relations and already heavily invested in promoting sustainable travel, was contacted by Prince Harry’s team after he heard about the company’s animal welfare efforts.

“We thought it was a joke,” she says. “I suspected he wanted to put his name to something but wouldn’t really understand the issues and wouldn’t want to be
actively involved – how wrong I was.”

Coming together

The duke founded Travalyst in 2019 after realising travellers wanted to make better purchasing decisions when it came to their holidays, but the information at their disposal was frequently limited and often difficult to grasp.

Davey highlights how he recognised that while travel companies and technology firms were making progress on various sustainability challenges, they were not only operating independently of each other, but often competing with one another.

“He decided to leverage his position and convening power to get everyone around the same table, to align efforts and really bring sustainability information to consumers for the first time, empowering them to make more sustainable choices,” Davey explains.

Davey insists Prince Harry is across all of Travalyst’s work, encouraging the team from afar “to do more, go faster and be better all the time”. She adds working with the duke has been an eye-opening and inspiring experience.

Big picture vision

“I love talking to him about big, global issues and how to address them through systemic change. Whenever I speak to him, he brings my head out of the weeds of our work, and back to that big picture vision.”

She praises Prince Harry’s long-term vision, telling TTG he is more focused on work likely to have a lasting impact over the next 50 years rather than “little campaigns” that look nice but don’t “move the needle”.

To date, Travalyst has convened a coalition of 13 partners, which includes some of the world’s largest travel and technology platforms such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Skyscanner and Google. It has also produced a list of approved assessors for accommodation providers.

A key early focus has been to develop a standardised framework for collecting and then promoting flight emission data to consumers to promote lower-emission flight bookings. In its five-year “milestone report”, issued in April, the charity claims to have provided emission estimates for 130 billion online searches.

“When I was working in the industry, we all had our own initiatives, but we were fighting for brand prominence – we were trying to own sustainability,” Davey explains. “The duke knew no one can own sustainability – we can only be successful together.”

So what’s on Travalyst’s agenda? Davey reveals the charity’s focus this year will be to launch the first version of its data hub, a single “source of truth” for all travel sustainability information.

The hub will start by collecting data from the accommodation sector, and then expand its scope to other areas of the industry. “Travalyst can leverage the work we’ve already done on collecting that accommodation data, collating it and providing access to more people so that it can find its way into the mainstream market,” Davey tells me.

Political clout

In addition, the charity will also seek to bring its political influence to the world stage this year, attending events such as Cop30 in Brazil, all while keeping a sharp focus on 2030.

“2030 is all about those big, global goals,” she says. “We need to make sure we’re at least 50% of the way to net-zero, that we have preserved at least 30% of the natural world, and that we are driving meaningful progress on equity and inclusion.”

Efforts to expand the charity’s reach are ongoing; Prince Harry this week shared his and Travalyst’s vision with the Asia Pacific market during a video address as the Trip.com Group’s global conference, telling delegates the region is "strongly placed" to drive positive sustainability practices.