More than 400 delegates, including 120 first timers, attended the annual conference in Edinburgh of the Institute of Management of the UK and Ireland (ITM).
The theme was Responsible Travel Management with nearly half the delegates saying they believed climate change was the most important issue facing the industry.
BTE reports on some of the debates
Striking a balance
Companies have to strike a balance in their approach to carbon emissions, Bernard Harrop, managing director of consultants IG Management, said.
The former American Express executive told a seminar on “Taking CSR beyond the legal obligation” that there were three for a company looking to cut emissions: price, quality and responsibility.
The third he defined as going beyond the first two and into the duty of care for employees and issues like health, safety and security.
“Whether you do something about this is no debatable – you either do or you don't. My company aims to help them with that decision.
“This is a business issue. Let's take the rate of emissions out of this. We are talking about changing a way a company does business.
“Few companies if any will reduce their profits by 20% to go green. So how can you reduce emissions and still control a growth business? “How do you balance that growth with a cut in emissions?”
He warned that if companies did not act on this, the government would and it would “tax and tax and tax”.
It was best to draw up a programme, covering education, organisation and training and to get employees involved.
Earlier Sarah Worthington, head of travel and transport for HM Customs and Revenue told how she was aiming to reduce CO2 emissions from her car fleet by 2011 by using smaller models and hybrid cars.
She was also imposing a limit of 1.6litres engine size on hire cars. If this size was not available, employees had to downgrade to 1.4 or 1.2 litres. “It is working well. There is little resistance,” she said.
Other initiative included carbon offsetting schemes, using tools which give travellers CO2 emissions as well as price for their journeys and MI on journeys.
Measuring performance
One of the great challenges facing procurement is understanding the difference between buying manufactured goods and buying services, Ian Palfreman, head of sourcing at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said.
In a seminar on Travel Procurement – What comes next?, Mr Palfreman said the pitfalls facing procurement executives included the risks in changing suppliers and leakage from company processes, like travellers going outside policy.
There was a need at all times to measure performance. But when agreements might have more than 40 items on them, what was the best way to measure?
“You have to ask ‘What is the value to you? Is it service, quality, time or cost?' But how do you measure the value of a managed travel programme and how do you demonstrate this value back to your company?” he said.
Other major issues now facing procurement were the duty of care and the environment.
“What are you going to do about this last one? You do need to travel to visit clients. You can't say you will not visit if the project is new.
“One way is to pick airlines where you can measure the CO2 for the journey,” he said.
Aviation growth “not sustainable” – Porritt
Jonathon Porritt, one of the UK's leading environmentalist campaigners, told the Conference that the growth in aviation was not sustainable “on anything like its current scale.”
Mr Porritt, programme director for the Forum for the Future, said the travel industry needed to be able to handle these emissions either by reducing them or by offsetting them.
“Without an offsetting scheme, your industry is going to be in deep doo-doo,” Mr Porritt said in his keynote speech.
“Your industry is absolutely dependent on good offsetting that the public can trust in. That is absolutely fundamental.”
He said it was a “massive ask” to see how aviation growth could be handles in the next 40 years or so, especially when people looked at the rise in major countries like China.
But he said people should not feel guilty about flying if they offset the carbon emissions from their flights and used other ways of transport where possible.