American Express has launched a reporting system that helps corporate clients assess the impact of their air travel on the environment. Called ECO Model, the program interrogates a client's passenger name records to measure the miles its travelers have flown and the consequent emissions they produce.
Amex director for industry affairs Bernard Harrop said the program has been launched in Europe after trials in Scandinavia with unidentified clients. ECO Model also is being prepared for introduction in the United States, although Harrop added that environmental considerations "are not really on the radar screen yet for U.S. companies."
Other travel management companies also are beginning to look at environmental tracking. A TQ3 Travel Solutions spokeswoman said her company on Jan. 31, 2006, at the Business Travel Show in London, will launch a monitoring program similar to Amex's. Business Travel International, meanwhile, is absorbing the lessons of working for HSBC, one of the most advanced corporate practitioners of environmentally aware travel management, to see what it can offer to other customers. Carlson Wagonlit Travel said it has no plans in this area.
Francis Sullivan, adviser on the environment to HSBC, told the Association of Corporate Travel Executives global conference in London in October that he would like travel management companies to develop their reporting. "The more it can be standardized, the better," he said. "Ideally, we would like individual staff profiles measuring CO2 emissions per person." That could even lead to capping travel for some employees, he suggested.
A show of hands during the session revealed that no buyers in the audience had yet embarked on an environmentally influenced reshaping of their travel program, but some said senior management has asked them to investigate the idea. "We will be having the same conversation in three years' time and there will be very few companies that won't have one," said Caro Cook, transportation section chief of the International Monetary Fund.
HSBC is one of an increasing number of European companies and public sector organizations that state their air mileage and consequent carbon-dioxide emissions in annual or sustainability reports. A few are making themselves "carbon-neutral" by contributing to energy-saving projects based on calculated emissions. The U.K. government has committed all of its departments to making such contributions by April 2006.
HSBC has pledged to spend $800,000 on carbon-neutralization efforts to offset business travel, which accounts for 15 percent of the bank's CO2 emissions. It has priced its carbon-neutralization payment at $4.43 per ton. According to the organization Climate Care, which operates neutralization schemes on behalf of corporate clients and private contributors, the average return flight from New York to London emits 1.56 metric tons of CO2 per passenger. British Airways is offering individual passengers the opportunity to offset emissions from their flights with Climate Care via the airline's Web site.
The question of what action businesses can take to "green" their travel program without impeding their ability to do business is a complicated one. In the United Kingdom, PricewaterhouseCoopers is looking at carbon-neutralization options and trying to reduce emissions through videoconferencing and using trains rather than aircraft or cars when possible
(BTN, May 16).Harrop said American Express will use ECO Model to help clients review policy. It is working with an organization similar to Climate Care, called The Carbon Neutral Co., to offer neutralization programs, plus such options as a London taxi firm that claims to be carbon-neutral.
Amex sees the ECO Model as part of what it calls a third-dimension approach to travel management. According to Amex, the first dimension of travel management is cost, the second is quality of goods and services purchased and the third is the corporate, environmental and social impact of travel. Other issues within the third dimension include financial accountability, traveler security and even traveler health.