The search for "green" standards
One of the great fears - indeed predictions - as the recession bit harder was that green issues, so much to the fore in recent years, would slip down the agenda.
It seemed logical that with money at a premium, any strictly unnecessary costs would be swept away.
Perhaps surprisingly this does not seem to be happening. The view of experts like Paul Tilstone, chief executive of the UK and Ireland Institute of Travel Management (ITM) that green policies and the downturn were complementary, rather than opposed, forces has held sway.
But a far greater challenge to the onward march of the green agenda was revealed at the ITM's "ECO-nomics: The Realities of a Green Programme" forum in London last week.
This was a packed event with more than a 100 delegates from buyers to agents to ecology experts. But if most the news they heard was positive, some was not. The main area of concern was the metrics: how do you measure the "greenness" of a flight, or a hotel, or a car journey.
"If you cannot measure it, you cannot reduce it," Bernard Harrop, a former industry affairs spokesman for American Express Business Travel and now managing director of a consultancy, IG Management, said.
As Mr Harrop stressed, measurement is the starting point for constructing a "green" policy. It is key. Without it there is no benchmark. But such agreed metrics, the necessary industry standards simply do not exist.
Take an everyday flight. To get an accurate measurement of passenger's carbon footprint, a calculator will need to know the type of the aircraft, the height it is flown, the number of seats, the number of passengers, how many travelled in each class, the weight of the cargo, the fuel burn and how long the aircraft spent stacking because the EC has not got a Single Sky policy in place.
Establishing this set of statistics is bad enough but at the ITM forum, Dr Keith Mason, director of the Business Travel Research at Cranfield University in the UK and an aviation expert, also pointed out that the same models of aircraft often have different seat configurations. So each flight is different and getting the right figures will take time.
There are models. The British government department of the environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) has a set of metrics which are widely used and travel IT company TRX has launched its own, impressive carbon calculator.
But again a calculator which embraces all the various requirements for accurate judgement and which is accepted as providing an industry standard does not yet exist. As Dr Mason said: "There is still some way to go for a carbon calculator for airlines."
If the aviation industry is moving slowly towards that goal, the hotel industry is barely out of the starting blocks. This is an industry where, as ABTN reported earlier this month, RFPs are becoming increasingly likely to contain questions of about the hotel's carbon footprint.
Hotels are also for many corporates now the greater part of their travel spend.
Alexandra Hammond, responsible business manager for the Rezidor Hotel Group, said: "RFP questions are getting more and more interesting. We are being asked things like how many metres of water are used per guest night.
"We see it in our restaurants where people are asking for locally sourced food. A flashy label for a hotel is now not good enough. Customers are looking for a lot of their green questions to be solved by the hotels."
Matthew Roberts, head of Business Sales UK and Ireland for Hilton International, said: "Growing consumer concern for the environment means that a hotel company's approach to sustainability is becoming a key differentiator in choice of accommodation."
But the only honest answer most hotels can give to the questions posed is ‘We don't really know'.
Peter Ducker, a veteran of the UK hotel industry and ceo of the Hotel Bookings Agents' Association, said hotels are trying to create an agreed standard by which to measure their sustainability.
"It is difficult getting a hotel to buy into it as they understand they need a comparison by which to measure what they use. The hotel industry is much more fragmented than the airline industry."
Mr Ducker has now set up a company, CarePar, of which he is ceo, whose aim is to establish an agreed metric for measuring a hotel's sustainability.
"It is obvious there is a gap here: how can hotels provide their measurement when there is no industry standard. How can they say ‘We used 200 units last year and aim to use 180 the next' when there is no measurement.
"We have to create an industry standard so they can tell visitors what their record is."
Mr Ducker is taking a two track approach. His company is working with PricewaterhouseCoopers and talking to their preferred hotel base.
He has also formed an alliance with Travelport which gives him access to the 80,000 hotels on their two GDS systems. It is going to be sometime before any standard is even suggested but at least the raw data is now beginning to be assessed.