Unexpected as a boost for leisure travel, Microsoft is imposing fees on corporate travel budgets that will benefit all of us that travel for pleasure.
The fees will be invested in sustainable aviation fuel.
Business travel accounts for 6 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, which at 29 percent overall is the biggest factor in global warming.
Touting this is the Global Business Travel Assn. in its report, Managing Emissions from Business Travel Programs: Overview of Corporate Best Practices. GBTA is a trade group of 7,600+ members that promotes the $1.158 trillion global business travel and meetings industry. The report is a step forward because it takes on climate change more directly than typical carbon offsets such as planting trees or contributing to wind and solar farm installations.
The report also points a finger at tourism. It says, “As carbon-pricing strategies work their way into corporate travel, it’s possible that more meeting [and convention] stakeholders will consider the carbon budgets or carbon fees associated with their events, and more meeting professionals might source destinations with these factors in mind.” [emphasis added]
This is widely shared intentional modeling. It will channel innovative consumer choices.
As Microsoft points out, leadership in climate action now means fewer employees will fly the five hours from the company’s Redmond, Wash. headquarters to a conference in Orlando because the fee, based on metric tons of CO2 emissions, will jump from about $38 to $250. A four-person team will invoke a $1,000 carbon fee.
Microsoft says its fee will force re-thinking of its personal and departmental budget for travel in “a development that, if matched by other organizations, could have an impact not only in emissions goals but also spur airlines to more quickly improve the carbon footprint of the flights they offer.”
Consider this open declaration of purpose contrasted with my early May posting of The Climate Traveler. That blog told of The Broadmoor resort’s intentional obscuring of its impressive climate action that no potential guest scanning its website would ever find, especially now that even that legalese cover has been deemed unneeded and has disappeared. Tourism simply doesn’t care if you care. The sad truth is that too many hotels still think that communications with their guests about climate action is like talk about syphilis.
Travel vastly feeds overtourism
Certainly when you book a conventional cruise, when you buy a vacation package from a major online tour operator or book an Airbnb. Likely if you just book your own all-inclusive.
This is because of the unusual time lapse that follows when it comes to pay for travel purchases.
Let me explain what the industry never talks about. Then I will introduce you to the way that the industry is fragmenting what it delivers into “niche products” — wellness, up-close experiences, agritourism — that at least for me promise how travel as a form of climate action is going to proliferate until this particular ”niche” becomes the new normal.
We buy travel way differently from supermarket buys
As travelers, we buy a product that we pay for in one place and that we almost always wait considerable time to enjoy that’s hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Contrast the extraordinary difference with products we buy in supermarkets. There we find ourselves among many people buying the same products that each of us typically enjoys only a few miles away alone or with family.
There is nothing else like travel that we pay for weeks and months in advance where we live before we open the box to enjoy or otherwise put to use someplace else across the globe. Nothing but travel involves enormous migrations that accumulate in the hundreds of millions each year.
When we buy travel, we do so ourselves at our individual computers. But we experience that travel often in groups or hordes, which typically have enormous impacts on where we unwrap the gift (the “right”) of travel.
This alone does not make travel a crazy thing.
That comes only when we create a system whose sectors significantly finance their operations by our willingness to pay for travel weeks and months in advance, which includes a greatly influential global hotel sector and other facilitators that include airlines, travel advisors, and a large and competitive and influential body of online booking agents.
All collaborate in national and para-national bodies that formulate and finance — largely by governmental outlays — what travelers from year to year find in vogue, what they quest to buy in the largely ethereal form of “experiences,” and that visas notwithstanding and other such impedimenta having to do with safety and forms of illegal trafficking, goes largely unregulated for social and environmental impacts.
Hotel developers have this laissez faire attitude that there’s no place that wouldn’t like a sleek new hotel served by armies of influencers including legions of celebrity “ambassadors” — Chef Emeril, Gwyneth Paltrow, most state governors, sheikhs — backed up by prestigious media from National Geographic, Condẻ Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure — their trade media, including Travel Weekly, Skift, and the many that publish only online. All together serve the facilitators on their free-floating world, and leave it to places we label destinations, where we as travelers dig in, to clean up the outfall. Most are only too willing.
Facilitators of travel in the face of the never-ending risks that the industry faces still bet on mass travel as its best bet
When Airbnb demands you pay up front for your entire stay, that money doesn’t go to individual rental apartment providers, It goes to Airbnb Inc. that allows the system’s ongoing expansion, despite continuous pushback from communities that feel overwhelmed by partygoers in residential neighborhoods. Although cruise ship holding companies are tens of billions in debt from their two-year shutdown during Covid, they can breathe easier because of their full prepayment policies. All-inclusives the same.
Yet the risks faced by tourism pale in the face of the Global Risks Report 2023 that explores some of the most severe risks we may face over the next decade. As we stand at the edge of a potentially low-growth and low-cooperation era, tougher trade-offs risk eroding climate action, human development and future resilience.
Skift, the largest travel industry intelligence platform, says this will be a year of action for the travel industry on the climate, But Skift cautions, greenwashing will continue to hang us out to dry: “[D]on’t expect radical changes, rather incremental steps and greater alignment as the industry attempts to shake off its negative image.”
NOTES
https://www.wri.org/research/business-travel-ghg-emissions-analysis
https://www.gbta.org/wp-content/uploads/Managing-Emissions-from-Business-Travel-Programs-A-GBTA-Foundation-Report.pdf, but also see https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-just-gave-enterprising-employees-a-kick-in-the-teams/
https://www.travelperk.com/corporate-travel-glossary/hotel-prepayment/ https://thepointsguy.com/guide/cruise-payment-plans-and-deposits/ https://www.frommers.com/tips/hotel-news/5-tips-to-remember-when-you-pay-for-a-hotel-room#:~:text=With%20a%20credit%20card%2C%20the,of%20your%20account%20right%20away.
https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-risks-report-2023/digest
https://skift.com/2023/01/10/climate-impact-moves-from-marketing-to-operations/
