The Challenge
As a global travel management company, we know cutting business travel emissions completely is not realistic and, for many of our customers who travel to do good, travel is a necessity. However, customers are increasingly keen to find ways to increase sustainable travel within their travel programmes.
The Idea
To assist customers with de-carbonising their unavoidable travel, we initially engaged with airline partners to develop ‘green’ airfares which involve the airlines funding, at no extra cost to the customer, the offsetting of the carbon emissions associated with their flight booking. A natural progression of this was to create a similar ‘green’ sustainable hotel offering to our customers, something never offered before in the travel market. Our idea was to develop an offer, where our hotel providers would fund the cost of offsetting the carbon emissions of the hotel stay of our customers.
Expedia Partner Solutions were an obvious partner to approach, as they are our largest hotel provider.
We also engaged our carbon offsetting partner, Cool Effect, a California based NGO and one of the world’s most advanced providers of carbon offsetting projects.
The Solution
Both Expedia Partner Solutions and Cool Effect were very receptive towards our idea. As there is no universal standard for measuring the carbon output of hotels due to its complexity by comparison to flights, we partnered with Greenview, one of the world’s leading sustainability data providers to the hospitality industry, to develop a bespoke average carbon emissions estimate per hotel night by country.
Together with Greenview, we used 12 months of hotel booking data for Key Travel bookers to derive a typical hotel type specific to Key Travel customers. We then utilised the Cornell Hotel Sustainability Benchmarking (CHSB) Index to establish an average emissions per hotel night by country for that hotel type.
For each hotel booking, we multiply the average emissions per hotel night by the number of hotel nights to calculate the carbon emissions per booking.
The CHSB Index is an industry-led global data collection and benchmarking initiative, with data on energy, water, and carbon emissions from over 20,000 hotels around the world. CHSB data is used by governments, corporates, travel management companies and numerous other organisations to determine benchmarks and estimates for energy and water usage, and carbon footprints. We have validated our methodology for calculating hotel stay emissions using CHSB data with the World Wildlife Fund.
Once we had a robust methodology, we worked with Expedia to develop our Carbon Neutral Hotel Stay programme. This involves for Key Travel customers having the carbon offset for their room paid for by Expedia on every Expedia hotel booking made via Key Travel. The carbon offsetting is managed by Cool Effect.
Results Of Carbon Offset
Our offer went live in October 2021 and through the end 2023, over 320,000 hotel nights have been carbon offset through Cool Effect projects.