New questions being asked – “Can this meeting be done virtually?” “What is your average carbon emission per travel day?”
FROM corporate travellers setting their own carbon goals to how corporates reclassify “essential business trips”, it is clear that corporate travel and meetings are set to change as the two sectors emerge from the Covid cloud, and suppliers from airlines to hotels and venues need to help corporates manage their new goals.
On the individual level, you have corporate travellers like Johnny Thorsen, a champion of technology and sustainability, who has set himself a personal goal of no more one-day business trips and if he has to fly longhaul (defined as more than eight hours), he will do so only if he can make it into a one-week trip.
Thorsen, who is vice president, strategy & innovation, American Express Digital Labs, doesn’t see himself as the exception. He told the WiT Travel Roadshow Episode 3 audience last week there will be a reduction overall in business trips – he estimates a 50% or more reduction in one-day trips – on the back of an accelerated sustainability wave brought on by Covid coupled with technology making virtual meetings better.
“Even while we are almost drowning in Covid news, we’re still seeing more and more data telling us how bad the situation is around climate change and carbon emission levels. Politicians are waking up and they are tightening the framework, there will be new rules in place that simply discourage cheap travel – minimum price per flown hour, an airline can no longer dump tickets,” he said.
Virtual has become the default, says Novartis’ Concepcion
On the corporate level, you have multinationals which have invested in technology (whatever they did not spend on travelling in 2020 would have gone into ensuring a business continuity platform) and will be asking “is this trip really necessary, can it be done virtually?”
Speaking at UFI Asia Pacific (the trade association for exhibition organisations) recently, Benjamin Concepcion, global head of travel operations, Novartis Business Services Global Procurement, said “virtual has become the default” and “clearly it’s an area that we are exploring”.
Novartis has deepened its investment in Teams by expanding the number of people that can be accommodated on the platform to 1,000 “very soon”. It has launched a portal called “Face to Face For Virtual” where meeting planners can convert what used to be physical meetings to virtual and it’s made investments into making meetings more interactive and collaborative, for example, digital whiteboards, active polling. “It is quite important that virtual meetings work effectively for us,” said Concepcion.
It has also built studios in several locations to offer a level of professional broadcasting capabilities for its meetings.
With technology giving corporates a level of comfort – that virtual meetings can do most of the “hygiene” work – corporates will reclassify business trips.
Then there’s also the level of comfort among business executives who have become familiar with virtual meetings. In regions like South-east Asia, where executives weren’t that accepting of virtual meetings prior to Covid, this is a sea change in corporate behaviour. Observed Chan Chee Chong, CEO of GlobalTix, who has executives spread out across South-east Asia, “We are finding staff meetings to be so efficient that we will definitely ask, is this trip really necessary?”
So he envisages a reduction in one-day business trips for quick meetings but rather travel only for those meetings where a deepening of relationship is needed or to close an important deal. “I can also imagine that I will go to more industry events but ensure I plan my schedule to have lots of meetings around those events,” said Chan.
Then, there’s the sustainability issue which Thorsen raised, and that will make corporates more mindful of their carbon footprint.
Concepcion said that every organisation now has a position on sustainability and on its RFPs, Novartis is asking suppliers about plans for sustainability positions. “We really want to understand what they are planning to do to reduce carbon footprint. Every conversation has sustainability in it.”
In September 2020, Novartis announced its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy, and one element of it is achieving carbon neutrality across its entire supply chain by 2030.
Kerry Healy, chief commercial officer, South-east Asia, Japan and South Korea, Accor, said the twin pillars of technology and sustainability have come to dominate discussions and negotiations between corporates and hoteliers.
From converting spaces to studios and partnering with event production companies, hotel groups such as Accor are trying to offer corporate clients a full virtual or hybrid solution when requested. Accor has also renewed its Planet 21 in Action commitment which called for 30% less food waste, 100% low-carbon new buildings and renovations for its owned and leased properties and 1,000 urban vegetable gardens in its hotels by the end of 2020.
Suppliers will thus have to tick more boxes to win corporate business and imagine if event organisers start to think of themselves as “trip planners”, helping their customers plan one-week activities outside their event engagement to meet their personal and corporate carbon goals.
New question to be asked – “what is your average carbon emission per travel day?”
Thorsen’s wish is for corporate travel to move to a place where the first question asked about a corporate travel programme is, what was your average carbon emission per travel day last year, rather than what was your travel budget last year?
The good news is, Thorsen said it will become easier for travellers and corporates to track their carbon footprint. “We have enough data to calculate averages but what we are now doing is we’re going into specific details – engine type of a flight, cargo load versus passenger load, the time spent on tarmac, all these things matter, and they’ve been captured and calculated, and corporates who want this can get it.”
He urged corporates to take control of their own data, which would then allow them to introduce micro services such as “intelligent dynamic carbon emission calculation”.
“After being involved in corporate travel for more than 20 years, I find it fascinating when a global travel buyer spending millions of dollars annually on travel says, my TMC will not let me use my data for a new service,” he said.
“One obvious one is intelligent dynamic carbon emission calculation. The moment somebody starts searching for booking options, they also see the current carbon budget and to see the carbon emission from the different options they’re looking at and, all respect to TMCs, they are not carbon emission experts, and should not try to become that. There are people out there who focus 100% of that, take those technologies and blend them into the booking process.”
Another example is profile management. “Very few people today know what their profiles actually are used for, what third party systems they have been sent to, who have access to the information in the profile. And then of course, again, back to things like pricing systems.
“Think about the hotel RFP process and how the big corporates are lining up their RFP process for 2022, because that’s what they are used to, instead of saying, perhaps this is the moment when I can drop it, and look at doing things in a different way.
“So all these areas are unique opportunities to have purpose built technology that managed one or two processes very well, but they have to be connected into the TMC tech stack.”
To corporate buyers who say they can’t do it because their TMCs won’t give them the data, he said, “It’s your data, you have paid somebody to process your data. Of course, you can do this.”
Hybrid events perfect combination of reduced carbon footprint and commercial value per delegate
He also sees exciting possibilities for hybrid events as meetings technology evolves from “square meetings” to “metaverses”. Second generation virtual meetings will create metaverses or digital universes where “you join as an avatar, you see others who are in the lobby, in the reception, and you can move over to them and engage in ad hoc conversations.
“So we are out of the square, and move into a real live venue, a so-called digital twin, for example Marina Bay Sands, where you hold WiT and I can go to the meeting room on level five, where I’m used to going in person. It changes the emotional connection to the meeting. I have tried several of these, it really does change your perception.”
For the organisers, “you now know where people go and spend that time, how many minutes of interaction took place between the avatars”.
As such, he believes, hybrid meetings will become the perfect combination of reduced carbon footprint and more commercial value per delegate, and will make it more compelling for people to attend the actual physical events when they can.
Thorsen told the UFI Asia Pacific audience the travel and events sector has the opportunity to become the global leader in sustainability. “I hope people accept that they have to pay more to travel and our industry responds in smart, innovative ways.”
• Featured image credit: Petmal/Getty Images
