Travel is an indispensable part of doing business. As companies expand their operations globally, business travel continues to increase exponentially. However, this travel comes at a significant cost – not only economically, but also environmentally. Corporate travel management refers to the strategy and oversight businesses apply to coordinate their travel logistics and expenses. Integrating sustainable practices into a company’s corporate travel policy can help to reduce its carbon footprint while also lowering expenses. There are challenges to applying sustainability in the corporate travel sector, but the business benefits warrant the effort.
Why Sustainable Corporate Travel Matters
The corporate travel sector contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. Estimates suggest business travel accounts for 15-20% of global carbon emissions within the transport sector. The aviation industry alone generates 2-3% of global CO2 emissions. Major corporations are now facing increasing legislative and shareholder pressure to decarbonize their operations and reduce their environmental impact. Integrating sustainability into corporate travel policies aligns with these decarbonization goals.
Adopting sustainable travel practices also enables companies to reduce travel expenses, which continue to rise exponentially each year. On average, travel costs represent the second highest controllable business expense for companies. The growing focus by corporations to slash travel budgets dovetails with the need to mitigate their environmental footprint. Furthermore, sustainable corporate travel helps attract and retain environmentally-conscious employees – particularly among younger millennials and Gen Z professionals. This emerging generation of workers prioritizes working for companies that demonstrate an ethical responsibility toward mitigating climate change.
Environmental Benefits
There are several key environmental benefits associated with applying sustainability principles to a corporate travel program:
- Lowers carbon footprint – Reducing non-essential business trips directly cuts down on greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, accommodations, and other travel-related activities. Prioritizing travel alternatives like rail or electric vehicles further diminishes emissions.
- Less waste – Encouraging the reuse of items (like name badge holders at conferences), reducing printing of travel-related documents, and providing recyclable or biodegradable food containers during trips all lead to less waste.
- Greener accommodations – Opting for eco-rated hotels certified by sustainability organizations helps choose hospitality vendors focused on environmental responsibility through initiatives like energy conservation, waste reduction, and sustainable sourcing.
Financial Incentives
In addition to ecological advantages, sustainable corporate travel can also yield noteworthy cost savings:
- Maximize traveler efficiency – Carefully evaluating the necessity of a proposed business trip often reveals alternative solutions like video conferencing that preclude the trip (and expenses) altogether. For essential trips, optimizing logistical details like route, hotel selection and length of stay balances productivity with financial prudence.
- Leverage negotiated discounts – Strategically planning corporate travel arrangements well in advance opens the door for bulk negotiations with preferred vendors that provide discounted rates on accommodations, transportation providers or other repeat travel amenities.
- Reduce fees and waste expenditures – Skipping ancillary charges (like airport VIP lounge access fees) and limiting unnecessary amenities (such as mini bar snacks and items that commonly go unused) during hotel stays helps pare down costs. Removing wasteful or redundant expenditures conserves resources.
Balancing environmental sustainability without compromising on traveler comfort or productivity necessitates companies take a strategic approach that commands buy-in across the organization.
Overcoming Challenges to Sustainable Corporate Travel
Shifting entrenched corporate travel cultures towards sustainability faces very real obstacles that business leaders must acknowledge and systematically dismantle through guidelines, resources, and accountability.
Traveler Opposition
Employees may resist changes that appear to directly take away familiar comforts, flexibility, and autonomy. Common grievances might include:
- Removal of business or first class flight options
- Swapping luxury brand hotels for lesser known eco-lodges
- Adherence to stringent new approval processes for bookings
Without proper context, travel restrictions might seem like punitive austerity measures. Transparent communication is key – travel policy alterations must balance sustainability aims with travelers’ needs.
Logistical Constraints
Certain business objectives intrinsically rely on travel frequencies and destinations that are environmentally taxing. Executives managing overseas operations or international expansion require extensive long-haul flights. Sales team territories may span wide swaths of national geographies necessitating ongoing domestic flights. Alterations to flight routes or plans may jeopardize deal momentum or employee productivity. Companies must carefully weigh how to apply sustainable principles without hampering business priorities.
Budget Tradeoffs
In some instances, the most sustainable travel alternatives carry higher price tags that hamper teams trying to lower expenses. Eco-friendly accommodations, rail passes, newer electric fleet vehicles, and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) sourced flights all come at increased rates compared to conventional options — though costs are progressively dropping each year. Securing dedicated funding or subsidies from executive leadership is often essential to cover premiums while transitioning to greener options until volume discounts kick in.
Best Practices for Sustainable Corporate Travel Programs
Certain proven strategies enable financial and sustainability wins:
Conduct Baseline Assessment
Quantifying current corporate travel volumes and associated carbon emissions set a benchmark to measure future progress. Analytics should track factors like passenger miles, hotel night stays, airline carriers’ flights, and ground transport usage. Surveying individual traveler preferences also aids planning.
Set Targets
Define specific sustainability limits like permissible annual air miles per employee or percentage of hotel bookings requiring eco-certified properties by 2025. Adding metrics into corporate travel policies, individual performance goals, and public ESG commitments increases accountability to stay on track.
Restrict Travel
The most impactful guideline is reducing the overall volume of travel through tighter approval protocols or lifting in-person meeting mandates. Virtual meetings via enterprise connectivity software often prove just as productive. When travel is unavoidable, extended stays allow for fewer round-trip miles.
Offer Sustainable Options
Where possible, provide transport mode alternatives that diminish environmental impact like rail over air travel for domestic trips or newer electric, hybrid or hydrogen fleet vehicles for staff use. Eco-friendly tips can be integrated into travel booking tools and post-stay surveys can capture feedback on sustainability amenity usage while traveling.
Incentivize Responsible Choices
To spur the adoption of sustainable options, corporate travel policies can introduce a spectrum of creative incentives like:
- Priority airline boarding/seating upgrades for early compliance with emissions thresholds
- Additional hotel loyalty points and air mile earnings through eco-property referrals
- Team rewards from saved travel budgets allocated towards office sustainability initiatives voted on by staff
Track & Report Metrics
Ongoing measurement of key benchmarks identified during baseline assessments enables companies to monitor advancements towards defined environmental targets and cost savings. Regular reporting through online dashboards, intranet updates, or internal conferences reinforces executive commitments to foster an organizational culture focused on sustainable travel.
The Road Ahead
Corporate travel management has entered a new era where sustainability can no longer be viewed as an afterthought or a separate initiative unrelated to the company’s core objectives. Integrating and balancing ESG priorities alongside critical business travel now represents both a strategic opportunity and competitive necessity for leading global enterprises across every industry. The potential exists to collaboratively reinvent sustainable corporate travel as the new universal norm rather than the exception.
Forward Momentum
Implementing sweeping changes to established corporate travel norms inevitably takes time, resources, and concerted efforts across myriad internal stakeholders. However, the volume of companies publicly sharing hard targets for carbon emission reductions from business travel proves that sustainable transformation in this sector is gaining momentum.
Continued innovation around sustainable technologies and infrastructure also promises more varied, affordable, and broadly accessible alternatives for eco-conscious corporate travel programs just over the horizon.
As promising as these shifts appear, the responsibility ultimately lies with influential multinational corporations to leverage their economies of scale en masse toward normalizing sustainable travel practices. Widespread adoption of comprehensive sustainable corporate travel policies aligned to net-zero emission standards could drive and accelerate sustainability progress industry-wide.
In many ways, the corporate travel domain finds itself at a defining crossroads today. Companies have an opportunity to either double down on convention by clinging to intensifying unsustainable travel volumes or collectively pave the way for a reduced emissions future. An increasing number of industry leaders seem poised to embrace the latter path. Most importantly, they are in a prime position to bring peers along by demonstrating first-hand how ecological responsibility can harmoniously meld with business travelers’ needs and companies’ growth objectives through mindful planning.
Corporate travel management has entered a new era where sustainability can no longer be viewed as an afterthought or a separate initiative unrelated to the company’s core objectives. Integrating and balancing ESG priorities alongside critical business travel now represents both a strategic opportunity and competitive necessity for leading global enterprises across every industry. The time for sustainable transformation is now.
