We have reached the end of another crazy year in both the calendar and the travel industry. It is, therefore, time for me write and share the next chapter in my “green travel odyssey,” and there is no doubt 2021 has been the most interesting year in terms of key developments in the sustainable travel arena. As usual I have spent time reading through my previous chapters to refresh my memory, and it is fascinating and very positive to see how much happened in 2021 despite the continued Covid-19 impact on travel and the resulting lack of resources and money. Based on this, I really think 2022 is shaping up to be the year where “sustainable travel” graduates from being an emerging trend to becoming a mandate.

Personal Sustainability Policy

Throughout 2021 I presented my latest edition of the TravelTopia story to audiences around the world—almost exclusively virtually with only one in-person appearance. Each time I included a public statement showing my own travel policy. The reactions were overwhelmingly positive, and a number of people actually reached out to share how they created their own personal policy as a result.

I am not telling anyone what their policy should be, but once you have defined your own sustainable travel policy it suddenly becomes much easier to decide whether you should travel or not for a given event. Here, I share my current personal travel policy and hopefully it can provide some inspiration for creating your own policy regardless of what it might look like.

Aside from my TravelTopia presentations, I still managed to take 21 flights with seven different airlines and flew a total of 70,856 km. With that, I can offer my estimated carbon emissions numbers, and I am also including my hotel stays for the first time representing a total of 22 room nights.

Flights: 17.33 tonnes CO2 generated by 21 flights on seven airlines (0.244 kg CO2 per km flown)
Hotel: 0.72 tonnes CO2 generated by 22 room nights (35 kg CO2 per room night)

Total CO2: 18.1 tonnes CO2
Offset cost: 172.92 ($9.55 per tonne CO2 offset)

I used Thrust Carbon to calculate my carbon emission as well as for the offset, but I also ran my travel data through four other carbon calculators to compare the results. The findings were fascinating. I will not “name and shame” any of the other calculation service providers, but there is clearly still a problem with inconsistent calculation models. [Editor's note: Thorsen is an advisory to Thrust Carbon, and a family member is an executive for that company].

The highest result (flights only) was 20.01 tonnes CO2 and the lowest was 7.46 tonnes CO2 and this is where the problems start. The variance is significant and one of the reasons why we need airlines to provide improved data about actual fuel consumption so we can start calculating based on factual operational data rather than average assumptions.

How Far Will Sustainable Travel Evolve in 2022?

As we enter a new year it is a tradition to predict what might happen. I am going to make an educated guess and make several predictions for “sustainable corporate travel” in 2022. Here we go…

A move from micro to macro measurement. I believe we will see progress in 2022 on the fuel consumption calculation challenge I outlined above. With that progress a new model will emerge that no longer focuses on individual flights and hotel, as that simply creates an unnecessary workload on both the individual traveler and the travel program owner. I, therefore, believe we will see the emergence of “whole supplier performance” as the dominant driver for service and supplier selection. The principle of selecting a flight based on an estimated carbon emission number three weeks before the actual date of travel is full of holes like “what will be the final cabin load factor” and “what if the airline changes the aircraft type.” A much better criteria would be to look at the average carbon emission per passenger mile flown as that is an immutable operational data point. 

SAF demand will continue and hopefully become more transparent. 2021 provided an incredibly consistent pipeline of major announcements from airlines about commitment to future SAF buying. Despite the positive SAF headlines we still have a major problem on our hands—a majority of the SAF announcements are made with several assumptions included, and the biggest one is the lack of basic supply of SAF worldwide which means the airlines can make these announcements without any real commercial impact.

In case you wonder, the global SAF production capacity in 2021 was still below 1 percent of aviation fuel consumption. Based on all known expansion plans we might reach 2.5 percent SAF production capacity in 2025. So while SAF does reduce carbon emission by 70 percent to 80 percent (depending on which model you apply), there is simply not enough SAF available to make a real impact until 2030 or later. So the only alternative strategy for reducing your corporate travel program CO2 emissions in the next eight years is to travel less. I know that is bad news for airlines and the wider industry, but there are no other credible options at present.

One of the most positive developments was the announcement about SAF commitments at an alliance level in late 2021. This marks the beginning of a completely new area of cooperation among the alliance members and will hopefully result in an overall faster development of increased SAF production capacity around the world.

Traveler recognition for sustainable behaviors. Airlines will start recognizing the travelers who have paid for SAF or carbon offset as part of their booking. This will probably happen as part of the pre-flight announcement but hopefully a few airlines will go as far as putting a green sticker on the seat of the traveler (at least in the digital seat map display) or perhaps offer a few extra loyalty points in return for the traveler's support.

KPI for virtual meeting vs in-person travel. Large corporations will start monitoring the number of virtual meetings and maintain a target ratio compared to the number of in-person trips. An example could be a corporate buyer launching a policy stating, “We allow one in-person trip per five virtual meetings.” This will ensure employees are using their limited travel freedom on the most important trips while going virtual for a majority of meetings—and also get the travel manager directly involved in the management of virtual meeting platforms as well.

Travel ban for specific trip types. Large corporations with strong focus on sustainable travel will introduce travel bans for select type of trips such as one-day trips. They also will mandate use of train or car for destinations where the flight time is less than one or two hours as an example. This is an interesting development as a corporate buyer quickly can identify how many of these trips the company had in 2019 and then determine how big a reduction they can achieve by adjusting the policy parameters.

Accelerating the net-zero goal. A few large corporations will start experimenting with how they can reach net-zero for corporate travel much faster than the popular 2030 goal or later. A potential model for doing so could be to direct the fuel cost savings achieved by not travelling into purchase of SAF or carbon offset until the zero target has been reached. In other words, if a company spent $20 million on air travel in 2019 and only spent $5 million on air travel in 2022, they could allocate $15 million to SAF buying or carbon offset and effectively reach net-zero immediately and operate with a completely new framework for corporate travel.

Rail operators start working smartly together. This is probably the most unrealistic prediction, and I am making it to create awareness of how bad the current situation actually is. During my recent extended stay in Denmark, I tried planning a trip from Copenhagen to London by rail, and the best connection I could find after extensive research would take 15 hours and 31 minutes and require three changes of train with two of them only offering 5 minutes and 8 minutes buffer for the platform change. The distance by rail is only 953 km, so imagine if the rail operators decided to make this journey possible in 8 hours as a scheduling goal—it would probably be enough to shift a relevant share of people from air to train and help corporations achieve their net-zero goals much faster.

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This opinion piece is an edited version of Thorsen's original LinkedIn post, "Time has come for greener air travel - part 5." It was edited and included in BTN's What to Watch 2022 with the author's permission.