Prince Harry has taken another small step away from the royal family with a subtle change on the website for Travalyst, his sustainable travel initiative. The site initially noted the organization was led by His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, but it was recently changed to reads just “Led by the Duke of Sussex.” Part of Harry and Megan Markle’s plan to withdraw from senior royal family duties included dropping the “HRH” title.
Back in January, Queen Elizabeth II and Buckingham Palace announced the details of what became known as “Megxit.” The announcement specified that the couple will “not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the Royal Family.” During a Tavalyst event the following month, the Duke of Sussex said he just wants to be called “Harry” from now on. When he applied to register the initiative’s name, he used “Prince Henry Charles Albert David, Duke of Sussex,” dropping the Mountbatten-Windsor name.
Videos by PopCulture.com
Harry launched Travalyst in September 2019, notes Us Weekly. According to the initiative’s site, it “is a bold new global initiative founded by Booking.com, Skyscanner, Trip.com, TripAdvisor and Visa, with the ambition to change the impact of travel, for good.” The organizers “believe in the power and importance of travel and that we also have a shared responsibility to our planet and to each other.”
The initiative came at the center of a controversy for Harry last year. While the goal of Travalyst is to promote responsible travel, Markel and Harry were accused of hypocrisy when it was learned they took four private jet flights in just 11 days in August 2019. During an Amsterdam event in September, Harry addressed the situation, telling attendees, “We can all do better and while no one is perfect, we all have a responsibility for our own individual impact. The question is what we do to balance it out.”
Harry said the couple plan to “do better” and noted he flew to Amsterdam on a commercial flight. “I spend 99 percent of my life traveling the world by commercial,” Harry said at the time. “Occasionally there needs to be an opportunity based on a unique circumstance to ensure my family are safe, and it’s genuinely as simple as that.”
Harry and Markle now live in Los Angeles with their son, 13-month-old Arche. Their departure from the royal family remains under scrutiny in the U.K. During the week, new court documents obtained by the BBC revealed that Markle felt “unprotected by the institution” of the monarchy. The documents are part of the couple’s lawsuit against the Daily Mail’s publishers over the publication of a letter written by Markle’s father Thomas Markle.
