The environment was among the major concerns discussed at the annual meeting of the Swedish Business Travel Association (SBTA) in Stockholm.
The Association's special supplier committee, which has representatives from travel agencies, hotels, airlines, rail, car and card rental companies and GDSs, decided to analyse key elements of the environment which affect the travel market and its suppliers.
These include levels of CO2 emissions from various sources.
Travel managers will also form a special working committee to examine the same issues and at the end of the year, the two group plan to issue a joint statement on the subject to be sent to the Swedish authorities.
Among other issues discussed were the economy and traveller safety.
The current chairman Peter Borg was re-elected for a further two years.
Sol Meliá profits dip
Spanish hotel chain Sol Meliá reported a 4.1% dip in net profits to 20.9m for the first quarter of 2007.
Pre-tax profits also fell slightly by 5.9% to 65.5m.
The company blamed the fall on it not selling any of its hotel assets in the three month period to the end of March.
The company aim is to sell assets valued at 100m a year. It said that had it sold assets in this first quarter, net profits would have increased by 84% and pre-tax profits by 12.4%.
Sol Meliá said that during the three months, revenues rose by 6% to 290m and revenue per available room (revPAR) by 8.5%.
It cited the strong performance of city hotels in Spain and the rest of Europe, where revPAR rose by 8.5%, as drivers for this increase.
It said the Spanish city hotels' result were "particularly significant" as there was a good economic environment and also a rise in demand from both the business and leisure markets.
In Madrid there was a 12.5% rise in revPAR while in Valencia it rose by 9.1%.
Outside Spain, Germany returned the best results with a growth of 28.6% followed by London (23.1%), Paris (7.4%) and Milan (7.1%).
* see BTE's recruitment site www.businesstraveljobs.com