Plotting a course for sustainable business travel

The Omi­cron vari­ant of Covid-19 has thrown busi­ness trav­el plans back into dis­ar­ray, just as inter­na­tion­al work trips had returned for many. For lead­er­ship teams, it’s high­light­ed deep­er ques­tions on the true ben­e­fits of all those air miles. 

With the recent reopen­ing of air routes and the intro­duc­tion of vac­cine pass­ports, many of us were get­ting back to some sort of pre-Covid nor­mal­i­ty. How­ev­er, the glob­al move­ment of employ­ees looks set to be impact­ed once again by bor­der clo­sures and quar­an­tines. 

Before the pan­dem­ic, meet­ings, con­fer­ences and trade shows in anoth­er coun­try or con­ven­ing in-per­son to sign deals was the norm. But after near­ly two years of restric­tions, many com­pa­nies won­der if such trav­el is ben­e­fi­cial, both envi­ron­men­tal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly. 

The adop­tion of more sus­tain­able busi­ness trav­el poli­cies is instead being con­sid­ered, influ­enced by COP26 and chang­ing atti­tudes to sus­tain­abil­i­ty and car­bon reduc­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly among younger staff mem­bers.

Business benefits

Intralink is a British con­sul­tan­cy that helps west­ern firms expand into Asia. In 2019 its busi­ness mod­el revolved heav­i­ly around employ­ees and clients tak­ing flights. How­ev­er, when it exam­ined changes to its own car­bon foot­print – and that of clients – enforced by the pan­dem­ic, it found the huge car­bon sav­ings it achieved made no detri­men­tal impact on the num­ber of deals done. 

In fact, they went up, ris­ing from 75 in 2019 to 166 over the past 12 months, with the Oxford­shire-based com­pa­ny instead organ­is­ing vir­tu­al road­shows and trade mis­sions, plus using in-coun­try sur­ro­gates to rep­re­sent clients at Asia-based events. 

As well as the pos­i­tive envi­ron­men­tal impacts, there have been busi­ness ben­e­fits else­where, through low­er costs, less jet lag and staff hav­ing more time at home with their fam­i­lies, says CEO Greg Sutch. “You might expect us to be bal­anc­ing these huge envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits against a marked down­turn in busi­ness, but that’s not the case. This is down to increased effi­cien­cies and the way the pan­dem­ic spurred Asian com­pa­nies to embrace vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

Intralink will resume some busi­ness trav­el in future, he adds, but more selec­tive­ly “now we know what we can achieve with­out it. I sin­cere­ly hope oth­er com­pa­nies do the same, for the good of our plan­et, as well as the bot­tom line.”

A must-have policy

Research by Train­line Part­ner Solu­tions sug­gests a grow­ing appetite for change. It found 75% of busi­ness trav­ellers want to reduce their reliance on fly­ing for work because of its envi­ron­men­tal impact, while two thirds expect their employ­er to make sus­tain­able trav­el options avail­able.

Addi­tion­al­ly, 53% felt busi­ness­es were irre­spon­si­ble before the pan­dem­ic based on their lev­els of unnec­es­sary busi­ness trav­el, with sev­en in 10 say­ing those busi­ness­es not offer­ing sus­tain­able busi­ness trav­el set a bad exam­ple for future gen­er­a­tions. Wor­ry­ing­ly for busi­ness lead­ers, one in five of those aged 16 to 24 said they’d con­sid­er leav­ing an exist­ing employ­er because of their busi­ness trav­el pol­i­cy.

As co-founder of cli­mate action plat­form Ecolo­gi, Elliot Coad has seen his busi­ness grow by 650% in the past nine months, thanks to a greater desire for indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es to be cli­mate pos­i­tive. He believes recent lim­i­ta­tions on busi­ness trav­el have prompt­ed board­rooms to con­sid­er new approach­es based on neces­si­ty, rather than “con­ve­nience and extrav­a­gance”. Such lim­i­ta­tions should be main­tained if busi­ness­es want to be more envi­ron­men­tal­ly respon­si­ble, he says. 

“Cut­ting out unnec­es­sary short-haul and inter­nal flights and encour­ag­ing employ­ees to use more effi­cient forms of trans­port instead,” is one way for­ward Coad says. When com­bined with guid­ance on access­ing the best vir­tu­al col­lab­o­ra­tion tools to min­imise the need for face-to-face meet­ings, this “can help reduce car­bon emis­sions in line with what is need­ed to reach glob­al net-zero tar­gets”.

Innovative approaches

Busi­ness trav­el and com­mut­ing is includ­ed with­in the Scope 3 def­i­n­i­tion of car­bon emis­sions, mean­ing those that come from a company’s sup­ply chain and cus­tomers. Experts sug­gest a new sus­tain­able out­look should include every­thing from hir­ing elec­tric vehi­cles when abroad to ‘work­ca­tions’ that roll in leisure and hol­i­day time. Embrac­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the future like vir­tu­al real­i­ty gog­gles is also an option, with slow­er trav­el by train and sea oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions.

Flo­ri­an Hüb­n­er is co-founder and CEO of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Uber­all. He believes employ­ee trav­el must now be con­sid­ered by board­rooms think­ing about cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty. For exam­ple, Uber­all no longer requires every new hire to vis­it its Berlin head­quar­ters for an ini­tial induc­tion.

“We’ve sig­nif­i­cant­ly decreased the amount of busi­ness trav­el we do, con­vert­ing in-per­son new employ­ee induc­tions and cus­tomer meet­ings into remote ones,” he says. “We’ve even trans­formed our annu­al sum­mer par­ty into a 24-hour World Tour, where we book venues in each city so that almost no-one needs to fly.”

With sev­en offices world­wide and hun­dreds of employ­ees, Hüb­n­er says these adjust­ments make a notable dif­fer­ence to the company’s car­bon foot­print. “Rel­a­tive­ly small changes can make a big dif­fer­ence and reduc­ing busi­ness trav­el is a step in the right direc­tion,” he adds.

Those ser­vic­ing the busi­ness trav­el indus­try are also look­ing at more sus­tain­able ways of work­ing. Green Tourism, which pro­motes sus­tain­able tourism across the globe, has now intro­duced a Green Meet­ings stan­dard for hotels, con­fer­ence cen­tres and oth­er venues so they can demon­strate their per­for­mance against sus­tain­abil­i­ty met­rics. 

Busi­ness accom­mo­da­tion spe­cial­ist AltoVi­ta, mean­while, is devel­op­ing a plat­form fea­ture that shows which hos­pi­tal­i­ty oper­a­tors have imple­ment­ed sus­tain­abil­i­ty prac­tices and/or have sus­tain­abil­i­ty cer­ti­fi­ca­tions so com­pa­nies can choose accom­mo­da­tions that fit their val­ues. CEO Vivi Cahya­di Him­mel expects to see few­er but more impor­tant busi­ness trips over­all, some last­ing longer than usu­al so peo­ple can do more with more time, while reduc­ing the need for mul­ti­ple trips and mul­ti­ple flights back and forth.

Adam Kerr, founder of busi­ness trav­el plat­form Trip­ism, believes com­pa­nies must look beyond “token ges­tures” to cre­ate sus­tain­able busi­ness trav­el poli­cies cen­tred around chang­ing employ­ee atti­tudes. Pro­vid­ing trav­el teams with a base­line of data show­ing the impacts made by what they book can cre­ate an “increased under­stand­ing” to sup­port sus­tain­able choic­es.

“Through col­lab­o­ra­tive effort, the ‘end users’ of busi­ness trav­el can demand more sus­tain­able options and push for the cor­po­rate trav­el indus­try to become green­er as a whole.”