Gillian Tans, chairwoman of digital travel company Booking.com, said many of the topics the company is concerned about, including sustainable travel and technology, are featured on the agenda for Davos 2020.
Booking.com is a travel "metasearch engine" for accommodation reservations. It is owned and operated by US-based Booking Holdings and is headquartered in Amsterdam.
The website has over 28 million listings and the site is available in 43 languages.
Ms Tans said the company's customers want to make sustainable travel choices more and more, but are not actually sure when they make such choices.
She said the first thing the travel industry must do is start to help people down the path of sustainable choices to make the transition easier.
Here is the full interview I did with Gillian Tans, Chairwoman of @bookingcom at Davos 2020, which I mentioned on @morningireland this morning. In it she talks about travel, tech, women in business, climate change, overregulation, and digital tax. #wef2020 #davos2020 pic.twitter.com/mlapquwobQ
— Will Goodbody (@willgoodbody) January 22, 2020
According to Ms Tans, Booking.com is quite active in this space already and operate the "Booking Booster" where it actively helps start-ups that are active in sustainable tourism to make a bigger impact.
On gender inequality, Ms Tans said there is still "so much work to do" to achieve a more equal working and political environment.
She said this topic is very close to her heart and is also one of the key talking points at Davos where only 25% of the participants are women.
The Booking.com chairwoman said that gender equality is not just a numbers game but it is about companies and governments changing their culture to make sure they get more women into executive positions.
A recent report showed that it will take almost 100 years to get to equality, she added.
Ms Tans also said that regulation should not pre-empt innovation, adding that regulating global tech platforms should be avoided as things can get "very fragmented".
On the issue of tax, Ms Tans said that the global tax system is heading in the right direction, with the OECD talking about a global solution.
But she cautioned again about fragmentation where individual countries decide to go their own way.
