Business Travel and Sustainability: Isn’t It Pretty to Think So

by Robert McGarvey

Business travel is back.  According to GBTA, global business travel spend will hit $1.5 trillion in 2024, surpassing the $1.4 trillion notched in 2019 in a pre pandemic world.  GBTA says it will hit $1.6 trillion in 2025.  

But there are important changes in how business travelers travel.  The massive change: sustainability and employee wellness are now key factors in shaping corporate travel policies.  Bean counters are on the sidelines as other priorities rule. 

“Duty of care is everywhere now,” said Claire Steiner, the UK Director of the Global Travel and Tourism Partnership (GTTP).

What does that mean in concrete realities? According to Ryan Haynes in a Hospitalitynet article, it’s that “a company’s business travel policy might say that if an employee is travelling for more than four hours, they can book premium economy or business class on a plane. Rules like this recognise the impact of travel on wellbeing, and also on how productive and motivated employees can be when they are tired from travelling.”

I grinned as I read that, remembering my own initial business flights in an era where if a flight lasted longer than two hours we booked in the front of the plane.  Always.

But that era had long passed and in recent years I too often have flown coach on business trips and a promotion into premium economy indeed is a lovely thing.  

Another change, according to Haynes, is that “people take longer business trips. This is so staff can be more productive and incorporate more into their business trips, plus add on some leisure time too.”

Yes, that trip will be a day or two longer – but it will be less stressful and probably less tiring than many of yesteryear’s trips where I remember flying in the early a.m. from EWR to Houston, maybe having a business dinner there, waking early for a full day of meetings, catching a late afternoon flight back to Newark and getting home late at night.  Truth is, for most of that trip and maybe the first day back home I was operating at significantly less than full speed.

Give a worker more time on the ground and very probably overall productivity will go up along with employee satisfaction.

Add it up and the wellness related steps may be small but they are to the good for traveling employees.

But what about sustainability focused efforts which are becoming widespread, says Haynes: “According to Trainline Partner Solutions, 52% of businesses have already set targets for reducing their emissions from business travel, and 82% intend to improve support for employees to choose low carbon business travel options.”

Here’s the rub. It’s fine – indeed laudable – to set goals to build more sustainability into business travel but probably this will mainly be lip service. Air travel, especially front of the plane, is polluting. Period.

That’s why many European countries – Spain, Germany and France among them – are urging business travelers to use trains instead of planes. It’s a good suggestion but it’s also true that domestic travel in those countries involves many fewer miles than in the US and there’s also a good rail network in much of Europe but what we have in the US is old and rusting and slow.  It takes around two hours to fly from Chicago to NYC. It takes 10 times longer to go by train.  

From Phoenix to Chicago via train appears to take two days and nine hours. A plane flight is three and a half hours.

I’m not going to be booking via Amtrak soon and doubt you will either.

What about carbon offset programs for air passengers? When the New York Times looked into this it said forget about ‘em.  Here’s the headline for the Wirecutter story: “We Wish Buying Carbon Offsets for Your Flight Helped. It Doesn’t.”

The only real fix is to fly less which brings us back to where we started. More of us are now flying more for business and if we genuinely want to deliver sustainability goals the only way is to fly less.

Are we ready for that? The data say no.

But just about as certain businesses will talk up their ambitious sustainability goals.

Will they be achieved? To quote Jake Barnes, ”isn’t it pretty to think so?“