It’s tempting to look back to what some might consider the
Golden Age of travel management before airline commissions disappeared and remember
the large corporate travel teams and the ease of convincing senior management
of its value.
Since then, travel teams have shrunk and travel managers
have found themselves with additional responsibilities. These often include the
need to measure and reduce the environmental footprint of business travel
either because of a company’s desire to be greener or because they have been
forced to do so by regulation.
Just how travel managers are going about this was revealed
by BTN’s 2025 survey of nearly 200 travel managers. As would be expected,
responsibility for gathering emissions data on current travel activities is at
the top of the list of responsibilities that buyers have been tasked with, with
more than half (51 percent) of respondents doing so.
Achieving overall travel reductions was the second most
common sustainability responsibility (for 37 percent of respondents), with traveler
booking behavior modifications and encouraging modal shift each being actioned
by 35 percent of buyers.
Concepts such as carbon budgets or internal carbon fees have
been introduced by 11 percent and 5 percent of respondents respectively, while
more than one in five survey respondents (22 percent) has not pursued any of
the objectives listed.
BRINGING CO2 TO THE FORE
The survey also provides useful insight on which
sustainability initiatives travel buyers are implementing in their organizations.
Around four in 10 respondents (42 percent) say they are aiming to make CO2
emissions visible at the point of sale, while 37 percent have policies that
preference direct flights over connecting flights.
The promotion of virtual meetings tools is used across 36 percent
of respondents’ organizations and internal communications campaigns have been
used by one-third (33 percent) of buyers to engage travelers in their
sustainability efforts.
Thirty percent of organizations have policies that encourage
modal shift from planes to trains where feasible, but less common policies are
the prioritization of ‘greener’ search results in OBTs (16 percent) and amended
business class permissions (16 percent).
EMISSIONS ENIGMAS
When asked what they believe are the most effective tools
for reducing business travel emissions—whether they have deployed on them or
not—buyers ranked visibility of CO2 emissions at the point of sale above all
others. But as experts agree, the CO2 emissions estimates displayed in booking
tools are inconsistent.
CEO and co-founder of carbon calculation platform Squake Philipp
von Lamezan said: “In order to steer a program, you have to enable the
decision-makers. On a high level you have the corporate travel manager and they
set the rules, policies etc. But on an individual level you also have decision
makers because they can go by train or by plane; they can go business class or
economy.”
However, not all emissions figures
are created equal and different tools can use different methodologies. Some
are simple spend-based calculations, others, such as the widely used DEFRA
model, are based on distance or the number of hotel nights, while more detailed
methodologies, such as those from IATA and ICAO take into account aircraft
models and hotel and room types.
“Large online booking tools don’t understand that providing
their clientbase with one methodology is not sufficient. Everyone is doing
calculations and reporting a little differently. Just supplying one methodology
is not helping the case. Now there is so much confusion in the market and every
tool is telling a different story. That obviously leads to frustration and also
insecurities around how values are derived. The industry is so fragmented and
for carbon emissions you need to have consolidation,” said von Lamezan.
Point of sale information is useful but not on its own, said
Katharina Riederer of eco.mio, a browser-based extension which integrates into
online booking tools. “The decision on how to travel is partly taken before the
traveler even goes on the online booking tool so there is a limit on changing
their booking behavior,” she said.
External factors can also mean that travelers ignore the
nudges that tools give them. “If I am a frequent traveler and collect
Miles&More points, I will change only if I get a significant reason,” said
Riederer. “The top performing thing you can do is to change your policy to
include no-fly routes,” she believes. “The rest is about trying to bring the traveler
to where you want them to be.”
Gamification and points schemes can help, she adds: “Some
consulting companies are putting an incentive behind those points. It is
extremely effective because you have a real reason to change. You are not the
smart one anymore for taking the plane because you could be missing out on €100
you get from your employer,” she said.
According to the BTN survey, buyers believe the second most
effective tool for reducing emissions is the promotion of a virtual meetings
tool to travelers—36 percent of organizations said they had implemented such a
measure.
COMMUNICATION IS CRITICAL
Campaigns to communicate sustainability initiatives are
considered the third most effective way of cutting emissions—and a third of all
buyers have used such campaigns to influence their travelers.
Nadia Crowe, environmental sustainability senior analyst for
the industrial software company Aveva, said the company is building education
pieces into booking platforms and allowing people to see the carbon impact of
their choices.
“We don’t just go in and say ‘Hi, we’re the sustainability
team, we want to do XYZ’,” she explains. “It is really about taking them on
that journey into becoming sustainability champions. Often, our stakeholders
end up being the biggest sustainability champions.
“When you approach it with empathy and you realize that they
have a day job and they have their own KPIs too, it becomes about how can you
work together and how can you make it painless while achieving the same things.
That’s where probably the biggest success comes from.”
Julien Etchanchu, senior director of sustainability at
Advito, the consulting division of BCD Travel, said a combination of
point-of-sale emissions information and communications works best.
“It is better to have not only the emissions but also
messaging around why it is good to take, say, Virgin rather than United to New
York because they have much better aircraft,” he said.
Despite the implementation of a wide range of measures, many
of which are proving effective, only one in five buyers (21 percent) has
changed their travel policy or travel approval thresholds to achieve their
sustainability goals.
BUDGETING FOR SUCCESS
Etchanchu said his consultancy is increasingly recommending
the use of carbon budgeting to organizations, something that 11 percent of survey
respondents say their company has done.
He said one of the problems with sustainability messaging is
that when you tell a traveler they have made a good sustainable choice, there
is an inverted effect that they may even travel more as a result of their
efforts.
“With a carbon budget you solve that,” he explains. “It is
exactly like a financial budget; you have a global and a per-(department or
unit) budget and you manage those. If you have this information available,
people will travel better,” he said.
Zurich Insurance and design and engineering
consultancy Arcadis, each profiled within this BTN Intelligence report,
are among the growing number of companies to have successfully implemented
carbon budgets.
Etchanchu does not recommend individual traveler budgets,
even though they are technically possible. “If you do that you might end up
with an individual budget of, say, three tonnes of CO2 per person. If someone
has a business-critical need to travel to Australia they will explode their
budget in one trip. It’s a very easy way to make people feel guilty and you
need to keep some positivity in this. At a department level, if some people to
have to travel more then it is compensated by others who travel less.”
Integrated financial services provider Allianz is another
company that is implementing carbon budgets to help reduce business travel
emissions. The wider group has more than 156,000 employees worldwide in nearly
70 countries. It has a global travel policy and common standards on emissions
reporting.
Joel Schneider, a sustainability travel specialist at
Allianz Commercial, the group’s corporate insurance arm, said, “We calculate
what everyone’s using across our six and 12-month reporting schedules and
proportionally divide that by cost centers. We say ‘this is what you’ve used
and this is what you are able to use over the next 6 or 12 months in line with
our overall targets’. This means you can either run out of your budget for
travel or your carbon for travel, ensuring that targets can be met or even
exceeded.”
How rigorously is that enforced? Very much so, it seems. “In
investment banking the focus is very much ‘get my banker to where they need to
be’. At Allianz, I’ve never experienced at a top level so many stakeholders who
are so passionate about delivering on sustainability objectives and targets,” said
Schneider.
Carbon budgets can be flexible too, to allow for growth,
mergers and acquisitions, or even divestments. “We sold a part of our business
in the U.S. so we had to redefine our targets. We couldn’t claim that we had
just dropped our emissions by such a significant amount just because it would
look great, so we had to redefine proportionally what our targets are,”
Schneider explains.
DELIVERING ON DATA
Thrust Carbon provides its sustainability data in the Concur
booking tool and also powers data for travel management companies FCM and CWT.
On the corporate side, it works with companies like Toyota and Novartis as well
as large banking and accountancy firms.
“Our sweet spot is work with very large travel programs
where the CEO has said we need to get to net zero and everyone has to go and
work out how to do it,” said Thrust Carbon CEO and founder Kit Aspen.
He said what Thrust is being asked to do has changed. “If
you look back a year ago, it was about regulations, particularly European ones
such as CSRD. That has completely changed. Now, (corporates) need a financial
reason and the conversation around carbon budgets has started to accelerate.”
Global clinical research organization Parexel has a
three-pronged approach to reducing its travel emissions. The company provides
information at point of sale in its online booking tool and will soon display
carbon emissions in employee websites through a browser extension.
“We use nudging techniques to guide travelers towards lower
emission travel options,” said the company’s executive director for travel
& sustainability, Benjamin Park.
Parexel also uses internal messaging and education “to
promote low-carbon travel options and foster a culture of sustainable thinking
which leads employees to choose sustainable choices without the stick
approach”.
The final part of the strategy is to track emissions at a
granular level. “We contract with a third-party vendor to help us to harmonize
and standardize travel and expense data across sources for accurate emissions
calculation using granular methodologies,” said Park.
“One industry challenge is that various calculation methods
exist, and the emissions displayed during shopping and booking or on supplier
direct websites can vary from the final reporting or differ by reporting
sources. This is one area where the industry can lead with standardization.”
PUTTING A PRICE ON CARBON
Allianz Commercial’s Schneider said his company’s travelers
are not currently shown carbon emissions data at the point of sale. “It is
something we’re looking at implementing; we’ve got a couple of options that are
coming,” he said.
“Amex GBT, our global TMC, have an offering that they’re
working on. It is almost like an offset fee. Our online booking tool (Amadeus)
Cytric is also looking at integrating information at point of sale. They’re
both still in development and we’re looking at implementing one of those.”
Amex GBT’s scheme is a carbon pricing mechanism to help its
clients purchase sustainable aviation fuel and high integrity carbon offsets, said
the company’s head of sustainability, Nora Lovell Marchant.
“The clients that have been most successful have a sustained
financing strategy, building a carbon price into every transaction, then you
build up that pot of money over time and that gives you the authority and the
budget to do the things that need doing,” she said.
Many organizations are still laser-focused on cost rather
than carbon, but eco.mio’s Riederer said the two do not have to be exclusive.
The company has carried out research that claims to show that greener travel
options are cheaper in 90 percent of cases.
“We have assessed those figures among our own clients and
our prospects. The second step we take with clients is to calculate a return on
investment for them. We look at what would happen when we go for the more
sustainable alternatives,” Riederer explains.
“This gives them the possibility to push this internally and
because they don’t only need the sustainability division pushing for it or
giving a budget, it actually plays to their overall targets, which is cost
control.”
Our survey found that more than a third of travel managers
are involved in attempting to get travelers to modify their booking behavior,
such as encouraging modal shift from air to rail. If eco.mio’s data is as
robust as Riederer said, this could be a solid route to a sustainable future
for business travel where rail infrastructure provides that opportunity.
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