Everybody related to the global travel industry is commemorating
a most unhappy anniversary. Depending on where in the world you are located,
the first half of March likely marks one full year since your last travel event.
Even if, like me, you have been lucky enough to travel a few times for private reasons, it remains the anniversary of the day our beloved industry went into hiatus
and business travel became a distant memo

Without going into a debate about all the things that went
wrong or could have been handled better with the clarity of hindsight, I would
like to outline some of the good things that emerged from the shutdown. After
all, one of the golden rules in most industries is “never waste a good crisis.”

Here we go:

Part 1: Sustainability Is a Clear Winner

Even before Covid-19 hit, we were seeing very clear signs of
a rapid re-emergence of “sustainable travel” powered by flygskam,
aka flight shame, the term coined in 2018 in Sweden that
refers to the inherent guilt associated with the carbon emissions of flying.
Looking at the overall status here in March 2021 there is no doubt we have
entered a new phase where the concept of “unlimited cheap leisure travel” and
“almost unlimited but more expensive corporate travel” has been replaced by a
new mindset of “justifiable,” “purposeful,” “value driven” or “permissible”
travel—all of them refer to the fact that we now have evidence of a meaningful
alternative which is “not to travel” and therefore there will be a growing need
to document why a given trip actually is necessary since it comes with a significant
carbon emission cost for the environment.

It is still early days, and we are yet to see the actual
rebound of travel happening, but it will be very interesting to see how corporate
travel budgets will look in 2022 and beyond when the pandemic dust has settled and
both government and company restrictions are lifted. Clearly, we need new
technology to calculate the value of a trip based on the corporate framework
and rules, and this is likely to appear in the form of new microservices designed
and developed so they can be plugged into the existing travel program—both the
online booking engines and the agent point of sales desktops

Furthermore, the core booking process will be merged with a
clever mix of carbon emission awareness and optimization combined with new
elements such as carbon budget management and sustainable air fuel blending
rates—all designed to lower the number of trips or extend the average duration
to get a higher return of investment for each travel event.

Hopefully this will lead the industry to a place
where the first question asked about a corporate travel program is “what was
your average carbon emission per travel day last year” rather than “what was
your travel budget last year.”

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Editor’s Note: Don’t miss tomorrow’s installment of this five-part opinion piece. In Part 2, Johnny will offer his thoughts on virtual and hybrid meetings. Email [email protected] to tell BTN about your business travel silver lining.