Corporates have achieved "incremental" progress in making their business travel programs more sustainable this year despite "challenging" headwinds, according to the latest update from the GBTA Foundation.
The foundation's 2026 Sustainability Acceleration Challenge benchmarks more than 200 organizations globally across a range of sustainability categories including procurement, emissions tracking, decarbonization and decision-making. This is the third annual report after the GBTA launched the initiative in 2024.
GBTA gives companies' sustainability programs a "maturity score" based on a five-point scale: zero indicates that an organization is doing nothing toward sustainability and five shows that it is using leading sustainability practices.
The 2026 benchmark analyzed travel program data from 204 companies in 28 countries. It found that the average travel program maturity score globally for sustainability efforts reached 1.5 in 2026—up from 1.4 in 2025 and 1.3 in 2024.
GBTA said the strongest year-over-year progress was made in sustainable procurement (up from 1.5 to 1.6 year over year), with more companies now selecting suppliers based on climate criteria (41 percent) and embedding sustainability requirements in their contracts (39 percent).
There was also upward movement in decarbonization (increasing from 0.7 to 0.8 year over year), which includes the purchase of alternative aviation fuels – the number of firms adopting this policy rose from 20 percent to 22 percent.
Although, areas such as emissions tracking, target-setting and reporting (2.3) and sustainable travel decision-making (1.3) were flat compared with 2025.
"Three consecutive years of progress show that sustainable business travel is becoming more embedded in how companies manage their programs, even in a difficult operating environment," said Delphine Millot, senior vice president, advocacy and sustainability, and managing director of the GBTA Foundation, in a statement.
"But incremental progress isn't enough. The next challenge is to scale the solutions that can deliver measurable emissions reductions, from procurement and traveler choices to sustainable aviation fuel."
This year's report was unveiled at the GBTA Sustainability Summit on Monday, which is being held as part of the GBTA + VDR + ABTA Conference in Vienna this week.
GBTA noted that progress in Europe was "back on track" with the continent's overall score rising from 1.4 in 2025 to 1.7 in 2026, thanks to stronger action on emissions tracking and sustainable procurement than last year.
"This renewed momentum comes against a backdrop of continued regulatory and corporate focus on emissions measurement and sustainable procurement across Europe," added GBTA in its commentary.
Elsewhere, the Asia-Pacific region's overall score rose from 1.3 to 2.1 year over year as more companies adopted emissions tracking, target-setting and reporting, as well as sustainable procurement.
But firms in the Americas "lost ground" overall as the regional score dropped from 0.9 last year to 0.7 in 2026, which was mostly down to a year-over-year fall in emissions tracking. Although more firms have made decarbonization investments, such as buying alternative aviation fuels, in 2026.