Power tools

Earlier this year, food delivery company Just Eat started a trial where it began to label dishes with a sustainability rating. A falafel salad might get the top A rating while a cheeseburger gets an E. The jury is still out on its effectiveness.

Amex GBT’s VP for global product and user experience Mark McSpadden says the challenges faced by Just Eat customers are similar to those faced by buyers and bookers in the corporate travel sector.

“On the menu you’ve got price, sustainability, calories and then what do you actually want to eat? You have to be really savvy about what you're looking to optimise,” he says. Buyers and bookers of business travel are similarly pulled in many competing directions.

Until recently, corporate travel was taking a similar broad-brush approach on sustainability, with perhaps the only indication of sustainability when someone is about to book a business trip being a green leaf or some other similar device.

Yet the acceleration of once-in-a-lifetime climate events to once-in-a-lunchtime occurrences means that developers of online booking tools now have to do more. New legislation, such as Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, also means tech providers are trying to roll out new functionality to guide traveller behaviour and enable better reporting.

SAP Concur announced the evolution of its online booking tool and expense platform at GBTA in Dallas in August. It is adding more sustainability information and filters to help travellers and bookers limit their carbon footprint and make sustainable choices. The new look is being rolled out to Sabre users in the US but will be available in both Amadeus and Travelport+ in 2024.

The company’s regional VP of supplier services EMEA, Paul Dear, says, “You've got the travel managers that have to do it for statutory reporting purposes and then you have the slightly younger generation that would actively go out and look for the most green, sustainable way to travel.”

Data is at the heart of the sustainability challenge. In the past, many UK organisations have used annually published figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to convert various types of business travel into carbon emissions.

Most online booking tool providers and TMCs now allow their clients to use emissions data from any number of sources, including Defra.

"Most travel buyers are not sustainability experts and don't really have the time nor ability to start learning about all the different options, models and methodologies"

SAP Concur says it is agnostic on data but has partnerships with both Thrust Carbon and Chooose among others. “Equally the customer can bring to us there their chosen path,” says Paul Dear.

“For the CO2 calculation methodologies, we can use anything,” says Sarah Benarey, co-founder of the German startup eco.mio. “If there's something that you report on, we can use your numbers but we also have a partnership with BCD Advito using the [proprietary] GATE4 methodology. I believe it's the sharpest on the market at the moment.”

Thrust Carbon would disagree as it claims to have the “freshest and most complete sustainability datasets in the world” and offers access to its data via APIs or data files that providers import into their own solutions. Thrust’s dataset includes emission from flights, hotels as well as meals and ferry travel.

Amex GBT works with various data providers for Neo and Egencia, including IATA’s CO2 Connect. The latter avoids the confusion where travellers go into their booking tool and see flights on different aircraft having the same carbon emission footprint. “It takes into account aircraft, fuel type, load factor and flight time,” says McSpadden.

Some argue that carbon data including class of air travel, such as Defra’s, is contentious.

John Harvey of Globalyse said, “Airlines do not generally allocate the fossil jet fuel they burn across different cabins. Actual data per flight is not helpful because the passenger has no control over the airline’s sales performance (how many seats the airline has sold on each flight). The obsession with emissions by class is just a theory that seems to occupy everyone’s time.”

But is this supposed demand for such granular detail and technology to be able to incentivise sensible and sustainable choices just hype?

Writing recently on LinkedIn in a post that got viewed more than 20,000 times, Spotnana’s Johnny Thorsen said: "We have offered our customers a new travel policy rule which allows them to define a maximum amount of carbon emission per flown passenger kilometre – but after being available for eight months not a single customer has activated this rule yet."

Speaking to BTN Europe, Thorsen says, “Most travel buyers are NOT sustainability experts and don't really have the time nor ability to start learning about all the different options, models and methodologies.”

While individual online booking tool providers are trying to give users a wider range of options, some believe that the changes are not happening fast enough.

Eco.mio is using a different approach. It works using a browser plug-in over the top of other booking tools, such as Cytric, Egencia and SAP Concur, although it has also been directly integrated into the former.

Benarey said: “Online booking tools are super slow in developing and we don't want to be dependent on them”.

The eco.mio tech uses nudge psychology to influence booker behaviour. Benarey said this might include showing users trying to book a flight a message saying that three out of four colleagues had taken the train on that route.

Gamification is also in eco.mio’s armoury. Travellers are ranked on how green they are and this can be incentivised using rewards, in the form of prizes, experiences and, in some cases, hard cash. Benarey argues that this can be funded from the savings that can be driven through pushing people towards rail – she says nine out of ten trips on rail through eco.mio are cheaper than the air option trip. She also points to separate sustainability funding, something that may become more significant as the cost of incurring emissions increases.

Looking ahead, how will tech make travel more sustainable? The idea of company-wide and even individual carbon budgets is being discussed by corporates, TMCs and tech providers.

Globalyse’s John Harvey says, “Many climate-leading companies are now publishing travel reduction targets (normally against a 2019 benchmark)… and are also developing carbon budgets.”

Eco.mio’s Sarah Benarey adds: “Technically we can implement budgets but when it gets to implementation, we always get asked the question ‘How much budget does everyone get?’ Is it the same for everyone? Do we link it to last year's emissions? Companies really don't know where to start.”

Amex GBT’s McSpadden says many companies dodge the issue by translating carbon into dollars because “business units know how to manage dollars”.

Full integration between online booking tools and video platforms such as Zoom and Teams has yet to happen but seems like a logical progression. Consulting firm EY, for example, is using automated messaging to nudge people who have booked day trips to suggest they might want to have a video meeting instead.

"A no-fly zone for short trips could be driven by some form of approval based on the CO2 number rather than the price"

“Once they've made the decision to go on a day trip, they would then get an automated message to say, to support our carbon reduction target, please cancel this trip and go virtual,” says EY’s Karen Hutchings. Day trips are now down from 18 per cent of total transactions to 3 per cent, says Hutchings.

Spotnana’s Thorsen thinks a no-fly zone for short trips could be driven by “some form of approval based on the CO2 number rather than the price,” he says.

Approval tools seems rich with promise in this area. In the same way that a flight costing £3,000 might be referred upwards for approval to a line manager, the same could happen for a flight that busts through some previously set threshold.

Despite concerns, the ability to buy carbon offsets at the time of booking is still something that is proving popular, such as TravelPerk’s GreenPerk which launched in early 2020. A company spokesman said bookings through Greenperk have increased 55 per cent year on year.

Lufthansa Group’s Green Fares, which include both the cost of offsetting and the use of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), are selling well through direct channels. Some 200,000 such fares were bought in the first 100 days after launch, the airline said. It is now offering these via NDC connections to Spotnana. (The airline group took part in the company’s $75 million funding round in 2022.)

Incorporating the ability to book SAF at the point of sale seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

Globalyse’s Harvey says, “Although most of the current focus is on information to the individual at point of sale and calculators that offer offset and, in some cases, SAF percentage, the reality for managed travel is that any SAF purchase would be made centrally by the organisation,”.

Benarey is not convinced of this route. “I'm a bit critical of SAFs because people believe this is a way out. It was the same with offsetting five years ago. I don't believe that what is currently bought is produced in a sustainable way. How much fries do you need to fry in order to fuel a plane [with used cooking oil]?”

It raises a thought – maybe there is potential for a tie-up between Just East’s fast food app and the corporate travel sector.