Industry Players Convene on Solutions for Decarbonizing Business Travel

IHG, GBTA event unpacks challenges, opportunities for reducing footprint of corporate travel

Image credit: Skyler
Smith

First, IHG Hotels & Resorts and the GBTA
Foundation — the charitable arm of the Global
Business Travel Association (GBTA) — brought together
some of travel’s biggest sustainability leaders to discuss the decarbonization
of business travel. Co-hosted by Accenture, American Express Global
Business Travel, Delta Air Lines, Hertz and IDEO, the event
challenged more than 80 event attendees representing major organizations across
all sectors of the travel industry to explore tensions and collaborative
approaches inherent in balancing the necessity of business travel with the
imperative to reduce carbon emissions.

“While business travel continues to evolve and grow, the importance of human
connection to solve complex problems and drive business growth remains,” said
IHG Chief Sustainability Officer Catherine
Dolton. “Our industry’s
scale gives us an important opportunity to reduce carbon emissions; however, to
make meaningful strides we must work together more and inspire innovation. At
IHG, for example, we continue to innovate through our recently introduced
Low-Carbon
Pioneers
initiative. The first community of its kind in the industry, this group of
low-operational-carbon hotels will help us test, learn and share findings on
sustainability measures.”

Business travel remains a cornerstone of the global economy. According to GBTA’s
2024 Global Business Travel Index
Forecast
report, global business travel expenditures are expected to hit a record
US$1.48 trillion in 2024 and exceed $2 trillion by 2028.

And while airlines
are exploring fuel-saving behavioral interventions for
pilots
and rethinking emissions-adding frequent-flyer
programs,
and innovations around sustainable aviation
fuels
and carbon-labeled
travel
are gaining ground, none of these measures will scale soon enough to have the necessary
impacts — as the world grapples with the escalating challenges of climate
change, the need to reimagine how travel can be both essential and sustainable
has never been more important.

“Climate Week NYC wouldn’t be possible without the collective power of the
business travel industry to bring together businesses and policymakers in person
to foster change. GBTA and its Foundation are at the heart of building a
sustainable future for global business travel,” asserted Delphine
Millot, SVP of Sustainability and
Managing Director at the GBTA Foundation. “The continued success of our industry
depends on mobilizing organizations through events like this, as well as our new
Sustainability Acceleration
Challenge,
to drive practices that materially reduce emissions from business travel.”

Sabre, Google share results of Travel Impact Model pilot

Image credit: DC
Studio

Elsewhere at Climate Week, Sabre
Corporation — a leading software and technology company
that powers the global travel industry — revealed findings from its world-first
sustainability pilot project with Google to calculate its emissions from
business travel, using Google’s Travel Impact Model
(TIM) .

Developed by Google in collaboration with the
Travalyst coalition, the TIM is a transparent and
continuously improving model that aims to provide a single source of reliable
information for calculating and presenting the climate impact of individual
flight trips.

The joint pilot program involved a team of Google analysts using Sabre’s 2023
business travel data to calculate flight-level corporate travel emissions and
recommend strategies for future reductions. The project’s findings will empower
Sabre to help set realistic reduction targets and optimize travel efficiency.

“Taking responsibility for our own emissions, striving towards the most accurate
methodology and working on innovative ways to reduce emissions alongside
traditional methods are areas of focus for us,” said Jessica
Matthias, Sabre’s Global Sustainability
Director. “We were delighted to work with our partners at Google to extend the
TIM to cover past emissions, and it is exciting to be the first company to use
the TIM for value chain emissions disclosure. We hope that this can inform and
provide insights that can help other companies reduce their emissions from
business travel.”

Google analysts looked at TIM per-flight calculations and suggested CO2e
reductions based on alternative flight options. The analysis revealed that
focusing on the most polluting routes — ex: long-haul flights — could yield the
most significant impact. The TIM identified lower-emitting, same-day
alternatives for two-thirds of flights — including common routes such as
Dallas-London and Dallas-Frankfurt — with a potential emission reduction
of up to 10 percent.

“Companies increasingly need to understand and report the impact of their
business travel, and we are delighted to work with Sabre to pioneer the TIM as a
standard for real-world corporate travel emissions disclosure,” added Sebnem
Erzan, Global Head of Travel
Sustainability Partnerships at Google. “Our long-term collaborative efforts and
Sabre’s granular dataset made them the obvious choice for this pilot program.”

Business travel represented almost 7 percent of Sabre’s carbon footprint in
2023. The company can now incorporate these insights into its travel policy to
reflect these reduction goals. Sabre’s corporate online booking tool,
GetThere,
integrated TIM emissions data last year — enabling corporate travel bookers,
including Sabre’s own employees, to view accurate carbon estimates for their
flights during the booking process. Sabre will explore incorporating this
capability into its agency and corporate booking tools, so that customers can
see more accurate emissions estimates from their past bookings.

While business travelers make up only 12 percent of airline passengers
globally,
they are responsible for a much higher proportion of emissions — in Europe,
for example, they account for approximately 30
percent.
Many companies are focused on reducing travel-related emissions in response to
regulations including the upcoming Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive
(CSRD). Scope 3 emissions are often notoriously diverse and challenging to
measure accurately and consistently — with existing methodologies for Scope 3 –
Category 6 (Business Travel) lacking granularity.

The Travel Impact Model offers a granular methodology, allowing companies to
implement effective travel policies that encourage employees to choose
less-polluting flights without sacrificing travel needs. It is already used to
display emissions estimates on platforms including Sabre, Google Flights,
Booking.com, Expedia, Skyscanner and others within the Travalyst
coalition. Soon, it will be freely available to any company seeking a robust
method for measuring and reporting on business travel emissions.

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Sustainable Brands Staff

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Published Sep 26, 2024 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST