The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and the World Economic Forum announced that they are reinforcing their partnership to promote sustainable growth of the global travel and tourism sector.
The WTTC and the Economic Forum strategic partnership aims to advance safe and seamless traveling, develop projects to increase travel and tourism competitiveness and sustainability and support work relating to the future of work and collaborate on crises and resilience.
The two organizations plan to collaborate using their respective areas of expertise to produce forward-looking reports, provide mutual support for events and conferences such as the WTTC Global Summit and create information-sharing channels.
The first joint effort will be the WTTC joining the CommonTrust Network, which will provide a mechanism for states and the industry to agree on a harmonized, standards-based trust framework for health status verification to restart travel and advance coordinated efforts to support the recovery of travel and tourism .
“We are excited to reinforce our partnership with the World Economic Forum in order to broaden and expand the outreach of both organizations,” said Gloria Guevara, president and CEO of the WTTC.
“We believe that through our leadership and collective expertise, we will be better able to raise awareness on the importance of travel and tourism and drive forward strong research and initiatives for its sustainable development,” added Guevara. “The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated the global travel and tourism sector, and now as we come to the end of 2020, we can finally see recovery on the horizon.”
Christoph Wolff, head of mobility at the World Economic Forum noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for like-minded organizations to work together.
“The CommonTrust Network is an ambitious but necessary collaboration across and beyond the travel and tourism ecosystem, which will harmonise programmes related to digital COVID-19 test results and health record verification,” said Wolff. “Members of the network are building a much-needed global registry of trusted laboratory data sources, standard formats for lab results, and standard tools to make those results digitally accessible. This will go a long way to support the safe reopening of international borders and the resumption of economic activity based on travel and tourism.”
