CHICAGO – Travel consultancy Advito announces the launch of a new offering called Sustainable Collaboration. Through this set of sustainability-focused services, Advito and parent company BCD Travel work with clients to reduce travel demand and mitigate the environmental impact of business travel.
Sustainable Collaboration services help corporations achieve the following:
- Set up effective carbon-offset programs
- Reduce demand of lower-value travel through sustainable forms of collaboration
- Use sophisticated methods to measure travel’s environmental impact
- Engage travelers to make more sustainable choices
- Factor sustainability considerations into travel supplier selection
- Meet their companywide Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs)
“We’ve noticed a significant increase in demand from our clients for advice on how they can support their companies’ sustainability initiatives. It has never been this widespread,” says Lesley O’Bryan, Senior Vice President at Advito. “With a growing global focus on climate change and the establishment of a younger generation of business travelers, this trend is here to stay.”
In an analysis of trip-purpose data for more than 50 companies, Advito found that internal travel drives between 40% to 65% of travel spend. Companies can replace a majority of that internal travel with other effective forms of collaboration. Building a framework to help travelers decide when to travel – or more importantly, when not to – can reduce internal travel by up to 50%.
By helping travelers skip the trip, one client reduced travel costs by $5.5 million, avoided over 900 internal trips, and boosted productivity by redirecting over 15,000 hours of employee travel time.
Sustainable Collaboration is part of Advito’s and BCD’s continued effort to help clients reduce the climate impact of business trips. Other measures travel programs can take include:
- Assess your organization’s sustainability efforts with the Sustainability in Travel Self-Assessment Tool. Created by the Global Business Travel Association and BCD, the assessment allows travel managers to measure 10 areas of travel program sustainability to identify strengths and weaknesses. The tool provides recommendations for improvement.
- Carefully consider whether meeting in person is necessary or if alternatives to air travel are available that can help you reduce your CO2 Internal meetings that don’t boost sales or the bottom line are a good place to start using virtual collaboration and reducing trips.
- If flying is necessary, consider offsetting the impact of your business travel by calculating the cost of your CO2 emissions and donating that amount to sustainable energy projects around the globe. BCD’s DecisionSource lets you report on your company’s Air Emissions and provides summaries that can be used for CO2 compensation.
- Engage business travelers and raise their awareness by using tools like TripSource to share tips on making business trips more sustainable—such as choosing eco-label hotels, combining several appointments on one business trip, renting electric cars or using public transportation.
- Get more inspiration by reading BCD’s seven steps for greater sustainability.
“Whether it’s providing sustainability support through BCD Travel or creating new services through Advito, we’re continually reinforcing our company’s dedication to ethically managing environmental, social and financial responsibilities,” says Kathy Jackson, BCD Vice President and Executive Chair, Sustainability. “We look forward to working with our clients to build more sustainable managed travel programs for the future.”
