Invisible threads, lasting impact – navigating strategic partnerships in sustainable travel and tourism

By Birka Valentin, Strategic Partnerships Lead

Returning from the WTTC Summit in Rome this week, it was encouraging to see sustainability at the heart of so many discussions. But what resonated most was the call for stronger collaboration across the travel and tourism industry – a reminder of why strategic partnerships are central to our work and to lasting impact.

With time running short, progress on tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequity (among others) depends on accelerating action through collaboration. No organisation can achieve bold sustainability ambitions in isolation. Strategic partnerships can unlock speed and scale, creating the hidden architecture of change: the invisible threads that connect the industry and turn ambition into action.

New pressures on old models

Today, those in tourism working at the intersection of sustainability and partnerships are navigating an increasingly complex landscape. Political and regulatory shifts are reshaping what’s possible, with climate and biodiversity commitments under pressure. In many regions, the sustainability agenda is being pulled back, reframed, or politicised.

For Travalyst and the wider sector, this makes strategic partnerships more critical than ever. They provide continuity amid uncertainty, turn fragmented efforts into collective influence and are the mechanism that enables travel and tourism to act with more scale, speed and unity driving systemic change.

Strategic partnerships are not a “nice-to-have”; they are essential infrastructure for progress.

The hidden architecture of change

Strategic partnerships don’t show up in quarterly earnings reports or get captured in the tidy metrics of ESG or OKR dashboards. Instead, they play out in email threads, calls across time zones, memoranda of understanding, and trust built slowly between organisations with different incentives but shared missions.

This intangibility is both an enormous strength and a vulnerability. But when the pressure mounts on creating vital change, with crises, public scrutiny, and regulatory shifts impacting our whole industry, strategic partnerships play a fundamental role in keeping us resilient, connected, and credible.

What makes a partnership transformative?

• Shared purpose. A clear articulation of the long-term change both parties want to see.
  
• Radical transparency: about capabilities, limitations, priorities, and pressures.
  
• Investment in relationships, not just outcomes. The real work often happens in the quiet moments: informal check-ins, mutual listening, and ongoing alignment.
  
• Flexibility to evolve as the world changes. A rigid partnership is a fragile one.
  
• Recognition that building, maintaining, and growing partnerships is not easy. There will be differences in strategy and opinion, and resources will not always align. Success depends on navigating those tensions while keeping shared objectives in view.

Above all, transformative partnerships are built on the understanding that no single organisation has all the answers. True impact comes from pooling influence, reach, and expertise.

Collaboration in action

At Travalyst, we’ve built a network of strategic partners including Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), The Travel Foundation, World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (WSHA), World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), UN Tourism and others. Together, we collaborate bilaterally and multilaterally on a variety of different initiatives, ranging from policy and advocacy work to more technical projects, education and communications activities.

Here are some examples of our strategic partnership work: 

• We convene a group of strategic partners on a regular basis to exchange, align and better coordinate activities among our organisations with the goal to grow transparency and collaboration among all.
  
• Joining forces on policy and advocacy is essential to ensure the industry speaks with one voice and can shape responses to current and emerging regulations. Together with our strategic partners, we engage policymakers in Brussels to advance this work.
  
• Based on the shared ambition outlined in the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism, together with our strategic partners we’ve written a Call on Climate Action for Travel and Tourism and are working closely with UN Tourism on COP30 engagement (stay tuned!).

Why strategic partnerships matter more than ever

The sustainability challenges we face (climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequity) are too vast for any one organisation to tackle alone. Strategic partnerships are not a “nice-to-have”; they are essential infrastructure for progress.

They’re how knowledge flows between sectors, how trust is built across divides, how innovation scales. They help organisations move through uncertainty when progress is anything but straightforward. So now, more than ever, it is important to weave the invisible threads that hold collaboration together. Because no matter how strong a strategy is, without strong alliances, it’s just a plan on paper.