London,
26
February
2019
|
13:00
Europe/Amsterdam

Livia Firth- Booking.com’s 2019 Booking Booster Ambassador

Founder and Creative Director of Eco-Age sustainability consultancy teams up with the Booking.com Booster Program to identify and support the startups shaping the future of sustainable travel

London – 26 February, 2019 – Today Booking.com, one of the world’s leading digital travel platforms and a digital technology leader, announced sustainability business pioneer Livia Firth as the company’s 2019 ambassador for their Booking Booster accelerator program.

As Founder and Creative Director of groundbreaking sustainability consultancy Eco-Age and Founder of the Green Carpet Challenge, Livia will play a pivotal role in the 2019 Booking Booster accelerator program, joining the expert panel of judges from Booking.com to help determine which startups in sustainable tourism will receive grants from the company’s €2 million fund. Livia will also deliver the keynote address for the program’s final pitch event in Amsterdam on May 9th.

“As someone who travels a lot, going around the world to discover different supply chains and meeting the people who make our clothes, sustainable travel is one of my obsessions. This is why I am delighted to be partnering with Booking.com and playing an active role in their Booking Booster Program,” comments Livia. “I’m really looking forward to meeting these inspiring entrepreneurs and learning more about the innovative ways they’re using technology to make waves in sustainable tourism.”

“We are very pleased to have Livia joining the Booking Booster team in 2019 and to leverage her unique perspective as one of our judges,” said Gillian Tans, President and CEO of Booking.com. “We truly believe that travel has the potential to transform people’s lives for the better, helping to protect and preserve the destinations and communities that inspire us to take a trip in the first place. Livia really walks the talk when it comes to holistic, end-to-end sustainability practices and is a role model for the next generation of changemakers in this space.”

 

For the 2019 Booking Booster Program, Booking.com is inviting 10 social enterprise startups in the sustainable tourism sector to a three-week accelerator program in Amsterdam starting in April. The program consists of a series of lectures, hands-on workshops and coaching sessions, culminating in a final pitch to receive a grant of up to €500k from Booking.com’s €2 million fund in order to help support the next stage of projected growth for the participating startups. All the startups will also receive a full year of ongoing mentoring and coaching from Booking.com experts, as well as opportunities and access to collaborate with Booking.com on potential innovation initiatives and experiments to help accelerate their future growth.

In helping travellers to explore and experience more than 145,000 unique destinations all over the world, Booking.com also seeks to contribute to the ongoing health of these same destinations so that future generations can continue to enjoy them for years to come. Together with the Booking Cares Fund and the Booking Cares Labs, the Booking Booster Program sits alongside Booking.com’s internal volunteer program, where employees have long partnered with local organizations on projects that help improve destinations worldwide. Together these initiatives make up and further expand Booking.com’s commitment to make a positive impact on the global tourism industry. For more information about upcoming programs and opportunities, please visit the Booking Cares website.

Applications for the 2019 Booking Booster Program have already closed. The 10 sustainable tourism startups that have been selected to participate in this year’s accelerator will be announced at the end of this month.

 

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CONTACT DETAILS FOR BOOKING.COM UK TEAM:

lon-booking@ketchum.com

About Booking.com:

Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in over 200 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

With a mission to empower people to experience the world, Booking.com invests in digital technology that helps take the friction out of travel. At Booking.com, we connect travellers with the world’s largest selection of incredible places to stay, including everything from apartments, vacation homes, and family-run B&Bs to 5-star luxury resorts, tree houses and even igloos. The Booking.com website and mobile apps are available in 43 languages, offer 28 million total reported listings, including more than 5.5 million listings of homes, apartments and other unique places to stay, and covers more than 145,000 destinations in 228 countries and territories worldwide.

Each day, more than 1.5 million room nights are reserved on our platform. So, whether traveling for business or leisure, customers can instantly book their ideal place to stay quickly and easily with Booking.com, without booking fees and backed up by our promise to price match. Via our customer experience team, customers can reach Booking.com 24/7 for assistance and support in over 43 languages, any time of the day or night.

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, like us on Facebook, and for the latest news, data and insights, please visit our global media room.

About Eco-Age

Eco-Age is a specialist sustainability and communications consultancy. We are a leading and trusted voice, expert in bringing positive, sustainable change to key audiences. Our evidence-led sustainability narratives and programmes of change resonate with both consumers and industry insiders.

Over the last decade we have honed specific expertise in supply-chains, textiles, impact measurement, internal and external communications, PR and event-planning. The programmes that we develop are aligned with international best practice and feed into global targets. This means the change that we help to activate is real and substantive.

Our sole purpose is to distil our know-how, expertise, enthusiasm and talent into client campaigns, strategies and programmes that bring real and substantive change. Not only does this help to shift the dial on sustainable change, but it gives a new generation of conscious consumers fresh and compelling reasons to invest – emotionally and financially – in the brands of our partners.

Our current partners include luxury fashion and jewellery brands, fashion retailers (including online), real estate companies, celebrity opinion-formers, film and TV academies, music academies, and fashion councils around the world.

About Livia Firth

Livia Firth is the Creative Director of sustainability consultancy Eco-Age and founder of the Green Carpet Challenge (GCC). She is renowned for creating compelling frameworks and campaigns for environmental and social justice with global reach. A founding member of Annie Lennox’s ‘The Circle’, a powerful women’s advocacy group, she recently presented the findings of The Circle’s Living Wage report to the EU Commission. Livia is a UN Leader of Change and has also been recognised with the UN Fashion 4 Development Award. She is a powerful communicator on progressive change; her keynote addresses include to the World Economic Forum.