The Making of Business Travel’s Decarbonization Plan B

Today, the business travel industry is pinning its decarbonization hopes on three key pillars. The first is limiting business trips to purposeful ones, the second is adopting travel policies favoring low-cost, low-carbon travel, and the third is funding the purchase of sustainable aviation fuel.

Call this loose collection of initiatives our industry’s decarbonization Plan A. Business travel industry stakeholders support these pillars because they seem reasonable, they sound right, they feel good.

Plan A will work right up until a carbon-sensitive society holds its hand up and says, “Wait a minute…airline emissions keep growing, and the prospects for SAF, batteries and hydrogen look dismal. How do we know if all that business travel is warranted?”

Note that Plan A has no concrete goals, no widely accepted metrics for measuring progress and no mechanism for credibly reporting the business travel industry’s progress toward significant decarbonization goals. In short, our industry cannot earn a skeptical carbon-sensitive society’s trust with Plan A.

By April, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive reports covering travel emissions from large organizations will begin surfacing. These reports will show a few companies making commendable progress toward their carbon reduction goals. The majority will reveal a collective lack of progress towards reducing their travel emissions. Society will take notice.

Many of you will think each company should tackle its travel emissions as it sees fit. This view ignores the risk of our industry being painted into a “don’t travel by air” corner. The solution requires the “and” approach—urging companies to act individually and adopting a strategically sound Plan B, one designed to earn society’s trust.

Two Visions Diverge: Will the Industry Resolve Its Sustainable Future?

By June, many influential corporate travel managers and association leaders will be encouraged to address this problem. A large committee will form. By July, the group will agree that a strong Plan B must define what “good” travel looks like, set clear annual carbon reduction goals aligned with SBTi targets, and credibly report the industry’s progress toward these goals.

The group will split into Team 1 and Team 2, each to develop a competing vision for Plan B, then merge the best of each team’s thinking. By October, the two teams will meet to compare their visions. They will find stark differences.

Team 1 will envision earning society’s trust by: 1) having travelers tick a box affirming that their travel is purposeful and has a low cost and a low carbon footprint relative to other travel options, 2) setting an industry-wide goal of reducing travel emissions per employee at an annual rate of 8 percent beginning in 2030, 3) applying internal carbon taxes to fund SAF purchases, and 4) reporting anonymized travel emissions per employee to an industry-backed entity for annual publication.

Team 2 will envision earning society’s trust by showing a steady reduction in business travel’s absolute—not just relative—emissions. It will choose as its North Star the highly actionable goal of reducing business travel’s airfare carbon intensity (CO2e kg per currency unit) by 8 percent per year from its 2019 baseline. Achieving this intensity goal will mean, everything else being equal, simply buying higher-priced airfares, thus reducing the number of trips and cutting absolute emissions on pace with its SBTi-aligned goals.

Team 2 will explain that these higher airfares pay for themselves by preventing low-value trips and by affording higher-quality itineraries to help achieve more successful trips. It will define “good” travel as any trip that has an acceptable carbon intensity, poses little risk to the traveler’s health, safety or well-being, and is expected to earn a sufficiently high return on investment.

Team 2 will propose that business travel’s carbon intensity and absolute emissions be tracked monthly based on same-store anonymized ticket data provided by TMCs and credit card companies, paired with a high-quality and transparent CO2 emissions model for credible emissions reporting.

Team 1 will be aghast at the prospect of having to pay higher airfares to achieve Team 2’s North Star carbon intensity goal. “This means we won’t be able to take as many trips!” Team 2’s response will be, “You mean we won’t be able to take as many low-value trips while we wait for the airlines to decarbonize their revenues…which this helps do, by the way.”

Team 1 will ask, “Your plan says nothing about SAF—why?”  Team 2 will say, “Our priority is showing society that business travel is being done responsibly. We can’t wait for SAF to scale up. Our plan’s higher airfares will help airlines afford their SAF while our travelers get higher-quality trips. Airlines and businesses can have the same net zero goal and different strategies for reaching it.”

By December, the teams will agree on a Plan B. Team 2’s vision should prevail on all points if our industry’s leaders are sufficiently carbon-sensitive.