Longtime partners Sabre and Google have paired up to use the search giant’s Travel Impact Model (TIM) to calculate carbon emissions from the travel technology company’s corporate travel in 2023. The results are meant to give Sabre the ability to create realistic targets for reduction while also boosting operational efficiency in its business travel practices.

Jessica Matthias, global sustainability director for Sabre, stressed the importance of the company taking responsibility for its emissions and said it’s striving to reduce emissions in both innovative and traditional ways.

The analysis found business travel made up 7% of Sabre’s 2023 carbon footprint and that long-haul flights were identified as a key area for improvement. It also found options for lower-emitting same-day flights for two-thirds of Sabre’s air travel, including common routes like Dallas-London and Dallas-Frankfurt, with a potential emission reduction of up to 10%.

It’s not Sabre’s first effort to bolster sustainability. Last year it incorporated Google’s TIM into its corporate booking tool so employees could see the emissions of their chosen flights.

And Sabre and Google aren’t alone in their ambitions to prioritize sustainability in the business travel sector. Like much of the travel industry, the business travel community is starting to pay more attention to sustainability – but there’s acceptance among leaders that change does take time.

Sustainability becoming a bigger priority in business travel

Interest in sustainability has been on the rise in recent years with plenty of attention resulting from headline-making wildfires, hurricanes, draughts, floods, heatwaves – the list goes on. 

Many companies have developed initiatives that support sustainability efforts. Accenture teamed up with the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) to create an initiative called The GBTA Sustainability Acceleration Challenge. American Express Global Business Travel published a whitepaper in March in conjunction with Chooose on carbon calculations entitled “Measuring Impact: Air Travel Carbon Emission Calculations.” And already, some corporations have cut down on air travel spending, according to a Phocuswright report published earlier this year citing data from BTN.

Nora Lovell Marchant, vice president of global sustainability for AmexGBT, said that “without a doubt” sustainability has become a higher priority for the business travel industry. 

In fact, sustainability has become one of three top priorities on any CEO’s agenda, according to Jesko Neuenburg, managing director and global travel and aviation sustainability lead at Accenture. As a result, business travel has increasingly come into focus as companies begin to come to terms with resulting emissions.

The attention is a result of a number of “forcing functions,” according to Marchant, which include pressure from employees and travelers, a more stringent government and regulatory environment and stronger climate science. 

“The trends are all pointing in the same direction,” she said. 

Kit Aspen, founder of Thrust Carbon, believes interest in sustainability has come in waves over the years. He pointed first to companies in the 2010s that were forward-thinking and voluntarily took an interest. There was a second period between 2020 and 2022, according to Aspen, when interest in sustainability increased with climate disasters around the globe.

And he sees renewed interest coming as a result of regulation, he said, referencing the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and California’s climate reporting regulations.

Aspen believes regulation and policy will be the true drivers of sustainability progress, especially now that the industry is starting to heed impending regulation. 

“It’s a sad reality that a lot of companies either don’t care about the climate, or they are financially incentivized not to care about the climate,” he said.

But new rules really can make a difference – even if adjustment to new regulations is challenging for the industry. “It’s really starting to move the needle, because the penalties are just really, really severe,” said Aspen.

And that trend is likely to continue with more regions implementing regulations and structuring regulations that require decarbonization, according to Aspen. And, if governments get the basics right, that can catalyze innovation in the private sector and snowball to necessary financing, according to Marchant.

Neuenburg said that for the average company, business travel accounts for around a quarter of its total emissions – though for some firms it is more, depending on flight habits. Either way – the industry is paying attention.

“Those emissions, as we know, are relatively hard to kind of get rid of, and therefore people are now paying more attention, because we know it’s going to take longer to ultimately decarbonize that part of their emissions inventory,” Neuenburg said.

The technology helping to bolster sustainability in business travel

Neuenburg believes technology plays a critical role in making progress in sustainability. And that all starts with information.

“It’s critical to get the right data around business travel emissions, right? To even just understand where they’re coming from,” he said.

“We think you really need to have the right and granular data. You need to then have the right technology to support the organization, and then ultimately, it’s also about the communication and how you then manage behavior change for your traveling workforce.”

Different technology solutions can be helpful at different stages including reporting, reduction and removal.

“The reporting stage, it’s where you’re getting great, high quality sustainability data from,” Aspen said. “So that could be us, but also it could be those TMCs [travel management companies] that are using great data as well …. So I think from a technology perspective, it’s anywhere that clients can actually access good data, and normally that needs to be live, and it needs to be using a methodology that gives you the data down to an individual flight level.”

Radical transparency is making a difference, too, Marchant said, pointing to the difference made by the availability of information on emissions from flights, rides and more. From there it’s all about mathematics.

Once granular data on habits and where emissions are resulting from is collected and analyzed, action can be taken. Steps like embedding that information into booking tools to bring traveler behavior and decision-making into the process, and to monitor compliance with policies, comes next, according to Neuenburg. And, to him, reporting is the final piece of the puzzle.

Pushing the needle forward

Making business travel more sustainable comes with challenges that can also serve as drivers of positive change, including regulations, the granularity of the data involved and traveler behavior. Progress is multi-pronged.

Interest in the area will be a driver of change, too. Marchant sees the drive towards sustainability in the shape of a hockey stick and expects to eventually see massive transformation applicable to the economy and to business travel.

“There’s just increasing demand from our customers to have those products and services front and center, accessible to them, available to them,” she said. “From a technical development perspective, like including that in our product roadmap on an annual basis, including that in our budgets on an annual basis to build that out.”

And with the interest in the area and demand for products and services from customers, behavioral change is likely to follow.

Behavioral change, Neuenburg said, is quite important, too – and is typically enabled by the data piece. 

The data-evident issue needs to be made visible for understanding sustainable trade offs. If traveling employees and companies have good intentions and want to display the right behaviors, they won’t be able to without data and technology support.

“It really goes hand in hand,” Neuenburg said.