Making a more sustainable choice when travelling couldn’t be easier

 

Climate change is the biggest issue facing our planet right now and thanks to Covid, Cop 26 and activists we all feel more knowledgeable, accountable, responsible and inclined to act.

It’s no secret that employee travel contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, but travel is also incredibly important to business performance, and a physically connected world can drive greater cultural understanding, cohesion and collaboration, letting communities and businesses prosper.

This is why, in 2022, sustainability is top of the agenda for the business travel industry, with travellers, travel managers, TMCs and suppliers all taking action to push the needle towards achieving Net-Zero.

While implementing a sustainable travel programme may have once felt like an overwhelmingly enormous commitment, it is no longer as time or cost-prohibitive, and this is also helping to drive a collective commitment to change.

According to a recent study of 313 European travel managers by Business Travel Show Europe, 62% of travel programmes are now sustainable in comparison to 40% pre-pandemic, which is a fantastic shift. While 37% of buyers were managing a sustainable programme pre-Covid, 25% cent were introduced during the pandemic, and a further 23% are planning to initiate a sustainable travel programme in 2022.

As one in five travel managers* relies on their TMC to ensure their programmes are sustainable, at Corporate Travel Management (CTM) we understand and embrace our sustainability responsibilities as a business partner (and an employer) and we believe we have an incredibly important role to play in helping travellers, travel managers and suppliers to make the right choices for the planet. Technology is proving to be a real gamechanger in supporting our customers’ sustainability goals, whether that’s through carbon offsetting or reduction.

Making the green choice

Green Choice is a new tool incorporated into our online booking tool, Lightning. Options with the lowest CO₂ are highlighted so travellers can quickly and easily see the most sustainable travel choices. CO₂ emissions are also shown alongside prices in trip baskets to help show CTM customers their total carbon footprint for a booking.

CTM takes our CO₂ emission data for airlines from RDC, a dedicated aviation company that provides granular information such as aircraft model, engine type and fuel burn to allow CTM to make the most accurate calculations for CO₂ on any given journey.

Coming soon to Lightning and unique to CTM are carbon budgets. CTM customers can set carbon budgets at the company, division or individual traveller level that are displayed above search results in Lightning. When a traveller chooses an option before confirming, the carbon budget is updated in real-time to show the impact on their total carbon budget.

CTM Climate+

In addition, CTM Climate+ is a global climate action programme designed to support environmental sustainability in business travel.  Climate+ helps our customers understand the environmental impact of their travel, meet carbon neutrality goals and support environmental sustainability initiatives.

 

Carbon reporting

Post-trip, CTM’s Data Hub analytics gives total visibility of a travel programme’s carbon footprint right down to each individual traveller and trip, as well as at supplier level, to allow for future choices to be refined. The report can be broken down by:

• Total CO₂ emissions by month
• Average CO₂ emissions per trip and per traveller
• CO₂ emissions by service type (air/hotel/ car/rail) and by the service provider
• CO₂ emissions by fare class
• Estimated CO₂ offset costs per month, per trip and per traveller using the latest ACCU carbon credit pricing

If the business travel community is to achieve its carbon neutrality goals, then technology will always be key, but so will collaboration and we look forward to continuing to support travellers and travel managers to make more informed choices.

 

Reference:

* Business Travel Show Europe buyer survey, September 2021