If you’re reading this blog, you, like us, have used travel as a major component of how we do business. Over the past year, we’ve had the opportunity to consider our travel policies. From our customers, we understand that most large organisations will not be reflexively returning to previous levels of travel without considering the options.
It’s a good time to reconsider your goals for business travel as a whole, starting with what you want travel to achieve. Then you can review all your travel services suppliers and discover whether they can help you achieve those goals.
In this series of blogs, we’ll look at various options for your business travel reboot. Today, we’re considering climate impact.
If you’re responsible for your organisation’s Environment Social Governance, you’ll know that many corporations are already requiring their suppliers to demonstrate how they are actively working towards reducing their climate impact.
The most important first step in reducing climate impact is to accurately calculate your carbon footprint. Using all publicly available sources of data, we at Voyage Manager have developed a methodology that comes as close as currently possible to accurately calculating your entire organisation’s carbon footprint.
The calculator includes the CO2 emissions of your properties, your vehicles and yes, your travel, including taxi, bus, rail and air – your door-to-door impact. Using the data automatically provided by your travel agent, we also factor in hotel accommodation.
In terms of social responsibility, we believe an important feature of a carbon footprint calculator is the ability to make it public. Not a screenshot of your carbon footprint on a given day, but the active totals that change as automated data is fed through.
We also give you the ability to run reports on your carbon data, which lets you drill down into the factors that make up your footprint.
This first phase of our Climate Module is available now.
We have begun work on phase two of the Climate Module, which will give you the option to purchase climate offset directly through Voyage Manager. If you purchase carbon offset through another provider, you can import this data into our calculator.
Phase three will be carbon reduction. Already, we have, for example, the fuel efficiency ratings for hundreds of aircraft models. Therefore, we could tell you which commercial flights would emit the least CO2, thus helping you book the best route. When phase three is complete, this function will be automated.
As we continue to build our network of partners, we will continually add options for carbon reduction for your vehicles and properties. This could include, for example, partnerships with taxi services that use exclusively zero emission vehicles.
In the next blog in this series, we’ll consider the impact of the UK’s exit from the European Union on frequent travellers.
