To help our customers improve the sustainability of their corporate travel program, Amex GBT Egencia (Egencia^TM) provides easy ways to calculate, track, and report on carbon emissions and inform travelers. Sustainable travel is a team effort and requires travel managers and travelers themselves to work together.

We have recently launched two new flight travel policies that will provide additional support for companies with carbon emission goals. These policies will explicitly guide travelers towards more carbon efficient travel options whenever possible. You may already have some internal guidance on more sustainable travel behavior but to make it even easier for travelers to follow these guidelines, we’ve also integrated it into Egencia’s platform.

Guiding travelers with travel policy

Travel policy and approval are the backbone of a corporate travel program. They are widely employed by companies of all sizes and are standard practice in corporate travel. Travel policies offer useful tools to guide travelers towards the right kind of travel behavior for your travel program and help you reach your company goals.

They can be tailored to different regions and traveler needs and are communicated to them by messaging along the shopping path. Travel policies for flights, rail, car and hotel can provide many benefits such as cost savings, travel efficiency, and can help you protect your travelers when combined with duty of care features.

More specifically, flight travel policies are used by Egencia customers to:

• Set preferences for cabin class
• Restrict destinations for security reasons
• Set traveler limits and reasonable flight durations to promote traveler wellbeing.
• Set preferred airlines, where they may have negotiated rates or your company classify them as more eco-friendly.

More sustainable travel options

Our two new flight travel policies will enable you to be more explicit with your travelers about eco-friendlier choices when searching for flights:

• Carbon efficient flights: guides travelers to pick flights that emit less carbon emissions than average for this specific route and within the same cabin class. The carbon efficiency of the flights will also be visible to the traveler to help them make a more informed decision.
• Flights with train alternatives: points the traveler to train options where possible, since they emit far less carbon emissions. Travel managers will need to set a trip length criteria for the alternative rail trip, i.e. it must be less than a certain number of hours to be considered valid.

Whenever relevant, travelers will see an ‘out of policy flag with a popup message that explains the out of policy reason. These flight travel policy settings are available for travel managers under flight policy and alongside many other travel policy configuration options for car, rail, and hotel.

These policies are in addition to our recently launched premium sustainability features, which already includes tailored carbon emission calculations for air, new carbon compensation options, and traveler information and sorting of flights according to carbon emissions.

Where can I find out more?

If you want to learn more about these features, request a demo today. Already a customer? Speak to your account manager.