It’s tempting to look back to what some might consider the Golden Age of travel management before airline commissions disappeared and remember the large corporate travel teams and the ease of convincing senior management of its value.
Since then, travel teams have shrunk and travel managers have found themselves with additional responsibilities. These often include the need to measure and reduce the environmental footprint of business travel either because of a company’s desire to be greener or because they have been forced to do so by regulation.
Just how travel managers are going about this was revealed by BTN’s 2025 survey of nearly 200 travel managers. As would be expected, responsibility for gathering emissions data on current travel activities is at the top of the list of responsibilities that buyers have been tasked with, with more than half (51 per cent) of respondents doing so.
Achieving overall travel reductions was the second most common sustainability responsibility (for 37 per cent of respondents), with traveller booking behaviour modifications and encouraging modal shift each being actioned by 35 per cent of buyers.
Concepts such as carbon budgets or internal carbon fees have been introduced by 11 per cent and 5 per cent of respondents respectively, while more than one in five survey respondents (22 per cent) has not pursued any of the objectives listed.
BRINGING CO2 TO THE FORE
The survey also provides useful insight on which sustainability initiatives travel buyers are implementing in their organisations. Around four in ten respondents (42 per cent) say they are aiming to make CO2 emissions visible at the point of sale, while 37 per cent have policies that preference direct flights over connecting flights.
The promotion of virtual meetings tools is used across 36 per cent of respondents’ organisations and internal communications campaigns have been used by one-third (33 per cent) of buyers to engage travellers in their sustainability efforts.
Thirty per cent of organisations have policies that encourage modal shift from planes to trains where feasible, but less common policies are the prioritisation of ‘greener’ search results in OBTs (16 per cent) and amended business class permissions (16 per cent).
EMISSIONS ENIGMAS
When asked what they believe are the most effective tools for reducing business travel emissions – whether they have deployed on them or not – buyers ranked visibility of CO2 emissions at the point of sale above all others. But as experts agree, the CO2 emissions estimates displayed in booking tools are inconsistent.
Philipp von Lamezan, CEO and co-founder of carbon calculation platform Squake, says: “In order to steer a programme, you have to enable the decision-makers. On a high level you have the corporate travel manager and they set the rules, policies etc. But on an individual level you also have decision makers because they can go by train or by plane; they can go business class or economy.”
However, not all emissions figures are created equal and different tools can use different methodologies. Some are simple spend-based calculations, others, such as the widely used DEFRA model, are based on distance or the number of hotel nights, while more detailed methodologies, such as those from IATA and ICAO take into account aircraft models and hotel and room types.
“Large online booking tools don’t understand that providing their clientbase with one methodology is not sufficient. Everyone is doing calculations and reporting a little differently. Just supplying one methodology is not helping the case. Now there is so much confusion in the market and every tool is telling a different story. That obviously leads to frustration and also insecurities around how values are derived. The industry is so fragmented and for carbon emissions you need to have consolidation,” says von Lamezan.
Point of sale information is useful but not on its own, says Katharina Riederer of eco.mio, a browser-based extension which integrates into online booking tools. “The decision on how to travel is partly taken before the traveller even goes on the online booking tool so there is a limit on changing their booking behaviour,” she says.
External factors can also mean that travellers ignore the nudges that tools give them. “If I am a frequent traveller and collect Miles&More points, I will change only if I get a significant reason,” says Riederer. “The top performing thing you can do is to change your policy to include no-fly routes,” she believes. “The rest is about trying to bring the traveller to where you want them to be.”
Gamification and points schemes can help, she adds: “Some consulting companies are putting an incentive behind those points. It is extremely effective because you have a real reason to change. You are not the smart one anymore for taking the plane because you could be missing out on €100 you get from your employer,” she says.
According to the BTN survey, buyers believe the second most effective tool for reducing emissions is the promotion of a virtual meetings tool to travellers – 36 per cent of organisations said they had implemented such a measure.
COMMUNICATION IS CRITICAL
Campaigns to communicate sustainability initiatives are considered the third most effective way of cutting emissions – and a third of all buyers have used such campaigns to influence their travellers.
Nadia Crowe, environmental sustainability senior analyst for the industrial software company Aveva, says the company is building education pieces into booking platforms and allowing people to see the carbon impact of their choices.
“We don’t just go in and say ‘Hi, we're the sustainability team, we want to do XYZ’,” she explains. “It is really about taking them on that journey into becoming sustainability champions. Often, our stakeholders end up being the biggest sustainability champions.
“When you approach it with empathy and you realise that they have a day job and they have their own KPIs too, it becomes about how can you work together and how can you make it painless while achieving the same things. That's where probably the biggest success comes from.”
Julien Etchanchu, senior director of sustainability at Advito, the consulting division of BCD Travel, says a combination of point-of-sale emissions information and communications works best.
“It is better to have not only the emissions but also messaging around why it is good to take, say, Virgin rather than United to New York because they have much better aircraft,” he says.
Despite the implementation of a wide range of measures, many of which are proving effective, only one in five buyers (21 per cent) has changed their travel policy or travel approval thresholds to achieve their sustainability goals.
BUDGETING FOR SUCCESS
Etchanchu says his consultancy is increasingly recommending the use of carbon budgeting to organisations, something that 11 per cent of survey respondents say their company has done.
He says one of the problems with sustainability messaging is that when you tell a traveller they have made a good sustainable choice, there is a perverse effect that they may even travel more as a result of their efforts.
“With a carbon budget you solve that,” he explains. “It is exactly like a financial budget; you have a global and a per-[department or unit] budget and you manage those. If you have this information available, people will travel better,” he says.
Zurich Insurance and design and engineering consultancy Arcadis, each profiled within this BTN Intelligence report, are among the growing number of companies to have successfully implented carbon budgets.
Etchanchu does not recommend individual traveller budgets, even though they are technically possible. “If you do that you might end up with an individual budget of, say, three tonnes of CO2 per person. If someone has a business-critical need to travel to Australia they will explode their budget in one trip. It's a very easy way to make people feel guilty and you need to keep some positivity in this. At a department level, if some people to have to travel more then it is compensated by others who travel less.”
Integrated financial services provider Allianz is another company that is implementing carbon budgets to help reduce business travel emissions. The wider group has more than 156,000 employees worldwide in nearly 70 countries. It has a global travel policy and common standards on emissions reporting.
Joel Schneider, a sustainability travel specialist at Allianz Commercial, the group’s corporate insurance arm, says, “We calculate what everyone's using across our six and 12-month reporting schedules and proportionally divide that by cost centres. We say 'this is what you've used and this is what you are able to use over the next 6 or 12 months in line with our overall targets'. This means you can either run out of your budget for travel or your carbon for travel, ensuring that targets can be met or even exceeded.”
How rigorously is that enforced? Very much so, it seems. “In investment banking the focus is very much 'get my banker to where they need to be'. At Allianz, I've never experienced at a top level so many stakeholders who are so passionate about delivering on sustainability objectives and targets,” says Schneider.
Carbon budgets can be flexible too, to allow for growth, mergers and acquisitions, or even divestments. “We sold a part of our business in the US so we had to redefine our targets. We couldn’t claim that we had just dropped our emissions by such a significant amount just because it would look great, so we had to redefine proportionally what our targets are,” Schneider explains.
DELIVERING ON DATA
Thrust Carbon provides its sustainability data in the Concur booking tool and also powers data for travel management companies FCM and CWT. On the corporate side, it works with companies such as Toyota and Novartis as well as large banking and accountancy firms.
“Our sweet spot is work with very large travel programmes where the CEO has said we need to get to net zero and everyone has to go and work out how to do it,” says Thrust Carbon CEO and founder Kit Aspen.
He says what Thrust is being asked to do has changed. “If you look back a year ago, it was about regulations, particularly European ones such as CSRD. That has completely changed. Now, they [corporates] need a financial reason and the conversation around carbon budgets has started to accelerate.”
Global clinical research organisation Parexel has a three-pronged approach to reducing its travel emissions. The company provides information at point of sale in its online booking tool and will soon display carbon emissions in employee websites through a browser extension.
“We use nudging techniques to guide travellers towards lower emission travel options,” says the company’s executive director for travel & sustainability, Benjamin Park.
Parexel also uses internal messaging and education “to promote low-carbon travel options and foster a culture of sustainable thinking which leads employees to choose sustainable choices without the stick approach”.
The final part of the strategy is to track emissions at a granular level. “We contract with a third-party vendor to help us to harmonise and standardise travel and expense data across sources for accurate emissions calculation using granular methodologies,” says Park.
“One industry challenge is that various calculation methods exist, and the emissions displayed during shopping and booking or on supplier direct websites can vary from the final reporting or differ by reporting sources. This is one area where the industry can lead with standardisation.”
PUTTING A PRICE ON CARBON
Allianz Commercial’s Schneider says his company’s travellers are not currently shown carbon emissions data at the point of sale. “It is something we're looking at implementing; we've got a couple of options that are coming,” he says.
“Amex GBT, our global TMC, have an offering that they're working on. It is almost like an offset fee. Our online booking tool [Amadeus] Cytric is also looking at integrating information at point of sale. They're both still in development and we're looking at implementing one of those.”
Amex GBT’s scheme is a carbon pricing mechanism to help its clients purchase sustainable aviation fuel and high integrity carbon offsets, says the company’s head of sustainability, Nora Lovell Marchant.
“The clients that have been most successful have a sustained financing strategy, building a carbon price into every transaction, then you build up that pot of money over time and that gives you the authority and the budget to do the things that need doing,” she says.
Many organisations are still laser-focused on cost rather than carbon, but eco.mio’s Riederer says the two do not have to be exclusive. The company has carried out research that claims to show that greener travel options are cheaper in 90 per cent of cases.
“We have assessed those figures among our own clients and our prospects. The second step we take with clients is to calculate a return on investment for them. We look at what would happen when we go for the more sustainable alternatives,” Riederer explains.
“This gives them the possibility to push this internally and because they don't only need the sustainability division pushing for it or giving a budget, it actually plays to their overall targets, which is cost control.”
Our survey found that more than a third of travel managers are involved in attempting to get travellers to modify their booking behaviour, such as encouraging modal shift from air to rail. If eco.mio’s data is as robust as Riederer says, this could be a solid route to a sustainable future for business travel where rail infrastructure provides that opportunity.
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