Sustainability
Making business travel more sustainable starts with understanding its impact
Business travel plays an essential role in helping companies connect with customers, suppliers, colleagues and new markets. But every journey has an environmental impact.
At Global Travel Management, we believe the first step towards managing that impact is understanding it.
That's why we help our customers measure, understand and report on the emissions associated with their business travel, identify opportunities to reduce them and, where appropriate, make a voluntary contribution to wider climate action.
Our approach is straightforward:
1. Measure
2. Understand
3. Reduce
4. Contribute
1. Measure 2. Understand 3. Reduce 4. Contribute
1. Measure
Understand the impact of your business travel
You can't manage what you don't measure.
Global Travel Management provides comprehensive carbon reporting to help businesses understand the emissions associated with their corporate travel.
By bringing travel and emissions data together, organisations can build a clearer picture of their environmental impact and use that information to inform travel policies, ESG reporting and future decisions.
Carbon reporting can also help identify where changes to the way employees travel could make a difference.
2. Understand
Turn travel data into useful information
A carbon figure on its own doesn't tell the whole story.
Understanding where business travel emissions come from can help organisations make better-informed decisions about how their people travel.
That doesn't mean stopping business travel. Face-to-face meetings, customer visits, exhibitions, project work and international expansion can all make travel necessary.
Instead, good travel management can help businesses understand where opportunities exist to travel differently – while continuing to meet their commercial and operational needs.
3. Reduce
Make informed choices about how you travel
Once you understand your business travel patterns, you can start identifying opportunities to reduce emissions.
Depending on the journey and the needs of the traveller, that could mean considering rail instead of air, choosing a direct flight rather than a connecting itinerary, combining meetings into one trip or simply planning further ahead.
Not every journey has a lower-emission alternative that is practical. The important thing is having the information needed to make an informed choice.
Our role is to help customers balance sustainability with cost, traveller wellbeing, productivity and the practical realities of doing business.
4. Contribute
Supporting climate action alongside emissions reduction
Even with careful planning and more informed travel choices, business travel will continue to generate emissions.
For organisations that want to go further, the GTM Climate Contribution Programme provides an optional and traceable way to contribute to wider climate action alongside their own emissions-reduction efforts.
The programme uses a Hybrid Climate Contribution provided through ZEERO360.
Each contribution combines nature-based initiatives, including reforestation and conservation, with United Nations Renewable Energy Carbon Credits. Each unit includes the planting of a tree and the retirement of a portion of a United Nations-issued carbon credit representing 164.1kg CO₂e.
The renewable-energy carbon credit provides a measurable and verifiable element to the contribution, while reforestation supports ecosystem restoration and wider community benefits.
“Participating in Global Travel Management’s Climate Contribution Programme has been a game-changer for our company. Not only are we reducing our environmental impact, but we’re also showing our employees and customers that we care about the planet. It’s a win-win.”
- J.D., Managing Partner, Solicitors
A contribution, not a claim of carbon neutrality
We think it is important to be clear about what a climate contribution does – and what it doesn't do.
Participating in the GTM Climate Contribution Programme does not make a business trip carbon neutral, cancel out the emissions generated by travelling or mean those emissions did not occur.
Instead, it provides an additional way for organisations to support climate action while continuing to measure and look for opportunities to reduce the emissions associated with their own business travel.
That distinction matters to us.
Traceable climate action
Transparency is an important part of the programme.
Every climate contribution certificate includes a direct link to the United Nations registry, providing evidence of the retirement of the associated renewable-energy carbon credit.
The nature-based element supports reforestation and conservation, while the carbon credit originates from clean-energy projects operating under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
This means organisations can see evidence of the climate action their contribution has supported rather than simply being given a headline environmental claim.
The GTM Forest
Growing something positive from business travel
Trees remain an important part of Global Travel Management's environmental activity.
Through our work with our climate partner, Zeero, thousands of trees have been planted as part of the GTM Forest, supporting reforestation as well as wider environmental and community benefits.
These trees don't make the journeys taken by all our customers carbon neutral – and we don't claim that they do. They represent something simpler and more tangible: a positive contribution towards reforestation and climate action associated with the business travel managed by Global Travel Management.
Make sustainability part of your travel programme.
Sustainable business travel shouldn't sit separately from the rest of your travel programme.
Global Travel Management can help organisations bring together travel data, carbon reporting and climate contributions, providing greater visibility of both business travel activity and its associated environmental impact.
That information can support internal reporting, ESG objectives and conversations with Finance, HR, Procurement and sustainability teams.
Most importantly, it provides a basis for making better-informed decisions about future travel.
Where do you start?
Whether you already measure the emissions associated with business travel or are only beginning to look at your organisation's travel footprint, we can help.
You don't have to stop travelling to start making a difference. Start by understanding how your organisation travels, what impact that travel has and where there are practical opportunities to make better-informed choices.