Meta Assigns Emissions Value

Best Practitioner: Eric Rhode, Meta Director of Global Travel, Expense & Corporate Cards  

Best Practice: Tech giant Meta, parent company of Facebook, is piloting a program in which an internal dynamic value for carbon emissions is determined and assessed during the air travel search process and displayed to travelers at the time of booking. Several suppliers are in involved in the process: Spotnana sends the search and booking information to Thrust Carbon and receives in return a feed of dynamic flight emissions calculations that displays as a value alongside the fare. Advito audits emissions calculations post trip to ensure accuracy and drive improvements in the dynamic process.  

BTN: How did you land on this strategy in Meta's approach to sustainability? 

Eric Rhode: We've done a lot of work with partners over the years to figure out what's the best way to help people understand [emissions]. A couple of years ago we started this journey to dive deep into the data, to look and quantify what is what is the emission factor per trip, for flights, for hotels for ground transportation and for meals, and all those things together. We have really good data for the financial aspect of those, and we used that same shell to try and create factors for each one of those individual carbon emissions items.  

When we looked at how to influence people, we were able to give them information in a dashboard to say, here's generally what that means. But it wasn't affecting decision making when someone was making choices on booking. You can put the [raw] emissions number out there, but it's not an intuitive number for folks. 

Within your organization, which other departments were wrapped into this effort? 

Rhode: It's really a cross-functional effort. We have a top-notch sustainability team, and within our broader sustainability efforts, there's a net-zero organization that works with a lot of different areas of the company. We're not scientists, and we're not experts on saying this measurement is better than this one. They bring expertise, they bring guidance, they bring oversight, and they really own that goal. And then we own the implementation and the travel-specific execution of that goal. We worked with other groups, including our partners in finance and in sourcing, and our analytics teams were probably one of the most influential because we have to build pipelines and consume and collect a lot of data to provide it to the right teams. 

How did you obtain senior management support? 

Rhode: When Covid started, it just happened to be that year when we started our journey—we'd done reporting on travel sustainability for a while, but that's when we dove deep. We also formed a travel sustainability task force, and there was a handful of senior people representing multiple teams across the company who had a broader perspective of how this reflects the culture of the company and how we should approach it. That was a really good group to bring together. 

At that time, [Meta] was hiring a ton of people, and the bar was going up and to the right [in terms of] our emissions. We knew that this was going to be a difficult problem, [but] there's multiple ways that we can address it. We can reduce travel, and we're doing that. When you're traveling, there's best practices within trips. And there's a third area, looking at reductive factors when those don't reduce the amount [of emissions]. And so we could get their buy-in to say this strategy is a good one to go pursue to the next milestone while we developed options.  

How does your tech setup produce dynamic emissions values in the booking workflow? 

Rhode: Within Spotnana admin pages… you are able to apply a [value] variable of one to a thousand or whatever you want the number to be. Then there’s the factor metric ton to get the unit correct. So that’s the calculation. That’s how you increase or decrease the intensity of the variable that’s multiplied against the carbon emission. If [flight emissions are pegged at] 10 metric tons in a trip, you multiply it: It’s $10 per metric ton reduction, 10 x 10, it’s $100. [Editor’s note: this is a sample calculation; it does not reflect Meta’s actual configuration.]

[When it’s time to book], in the checkout flow where it’s time to confirm your profile information, [there’s] one more button to push to complete the booking. It has a summary of cost. It says, here’s the ticket price, here’s tax and fees, and here is what the emission factor would be that we’ve calculated. Thrust Carbon provides the emission factor. So Spotnana has a call to Thrust, and Thrust provides it. 

What was the reaction from travelers and budget stakeholders to this program? 

Rhode: For travelers, we're in a pilot right now. We're trying this content out. In general, when we communicate about sustainability, people react really positively to it. It's a really important thing at the company. … As a company and in organizational leadership, we're really cognizant of budget, what we're spending and why we're spending. So any additive cost, we review and say, is this necessary? Why are we doing this? What's the purpose?