Two thirds of Nordic companies have no CSR element in their travel policies, according to a new poll.
In the survey by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) of companies in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, only 32% said they had a CSR input in travel.
Cathrine Lundberg, senior consultant with CMM Consulting, told a joint ACTE Finnish Business Travel Association Forum (FBTA) in Helsinki she was "astonished" by the figures.
The poll also found that 87.2% of the corporates which replied did not measure or report on CSR data which related to travel.
This showed a slight increase on the 85.7% figure for the 2006 poll.
When asked what aspects of CSR companies focused on, the main area, identified by 93.6% of corporates, was employee health and safety.
Others area of focus were ecological sustainability (57.5%) and the welfare of the community (44.7%).
Those who did measure CSR data said that the areas of concern were COs emission for business flights, fuel consumption and the general emissions from operating a business.
But Ms Lundberg told the 100 delegates there had been some successes including one company which replaced some of its travel with teleconferencing enabling it to halve its CO2 emissions between 2001-2004.
Another company had placed a 1.8% fee on all airline tickets with the money raised being used to change company behaviour to reduce CO2 emissions.
But Ms Lundberg said that while companies were looking at how much they travelled around the world, they were not looking at how many car journeys they were making around Stockholm.
"Companies should ask themselves how many people they have travelling in cars. 70% of business travel in Sweden is travelling by car," she said.
Major savings through policy harmonisation
A Finnish consulting and engineering company with branches around the world made savings of up to 11% on its travel budget by harmonising and streamlining its policy, its travel manager told the Forum.
Teemu Tuomarla, corporate travel manager for Pöyry, said the project to change the policy had taken three years and included reducing the number of suppliers and introducing self booking tools and automated processes.
Mr Tuomarla said the project was carried out in three phase, first the harmonisation of travel policy and evaluating the travel management, followed by drafting new processes and finally going ahead with the changes and selecting the new suppliers.
He said Pöyry operates in 45 countries but the changes were begun in the five which accounted for 70% of its travel: Austria, Finland, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland.
He said the key issues which the project addressed were travel costs and traveller control, data which was the "essential thing" in the whole operation, changeable modules which could be used indifferent countries, harmonised methods of payment, control of travellers' profiles and making the new system easy to use.
The resulting benefits to travel management, Mr Tuomarla said, were smooth processes, especially on the financial side, knowing how to contact travellers quickly and a single sign on to reach all suppliers.
For the company, there was a good rate of automation which significantly reduced administrative work, control over internet purchasing and an optimising of costs.
Mr Tuomarla said there were four to five countries where his company worked which still had to be included but 80% of travel was now covered "which is enough for us" he said.
He said the crucial lessons learned were that harmonisation of processes was crucial to the operation, that people and units had to be steered in the same direction and that bringing people from different areas together also serves other purposes.
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