Industry Players Convene on Solutions for Decarbonizing Business Travel

This week at Climate Week NYC, several conversations centered around reducing the sustainability impacts of something affecting nearly every attendee: Business travel.

Published 3 weeks ago | About a 6 minute read

Image: Briana Tozour

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

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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.