Lower Your Sport Organisation’s Day-to-Day Business Travel Carbon Emissions with Lightning

Travel is back and a new mindset around sustainability has flourished.

Sports organisations around the world are committing to ambitious net-zero targets, as well as signing up to the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework.

Sustainable travel choices and more detailed information on the environmental impact of supply chains have continued to rise in the customer priorities in CTM's Global Consumer Survey for 2022.

Travellers, Travel Bookers, and those managing travel spend want an online booking platform that provides accurate guidance on emissions for flights, hotels and train travel so they can make informed decisions and influence a more sustainable restart, as well as making a meaningful difference to travel for their sports organisation.

Those managing travel want to be able to set and monitor achievable reducations in their carbon emissions from travel.

To support these needs of our clients and partners around the world, we have developed a whole range of tools and functionality in our online booking platform, Lightning, to help organisations drive greener travel initiatives.

It's greener on this side: CO2 per airfare segment in Lightning search results

For many years, we have provided dedicated carbon emissions reporting and offsetting through our dedicated Climate+ dashboard and suite of reports where you can see a breakdown of emissions by travel type, travel class, region, cost centre and more, as well as real carbon market dara on offset costs per tonne, per trip and traveller.

Analytics and reporting are great for understanding the level of impact or what key drivers are, but influencing new behaviours is a different challenge, one that requires different tools to engage individuals in new ways. That’s why we’re adding CO2 calculations at the individual airfare, hotel night and car hire segments in Lightning search results.

Did you know that the emissions for a flight from London to New York can vary as much as 25% from one business seat on one flight to another that same day? Or that the variance between the biggest emissions and lowest between flights in economy on the same route is as much as 39%? With such a significant variance in emissions from one airline to another, travellers must be informed at the point of search and booking, which is why we’ve made it easily visible alongside the price of each fare segment for all classes.

Understand passenger emissions by aircraft and cabin • 62% of passenger flights are on narrow-body craft, which contributes to over hald of passenger emissions (RDC) • The average global passenger emitted 90g CO2 per RPK (revenue passenger kilometre from Jan-Jun 2022 (RDC). • Around 17% of passenger emissions came from premium seating in 2022 (RDC). • Widebody economy class has the lowest emissions at around 60g CO2 per RPK in 2022 (RDC).

The proof is in the data For accurate flight CO2 calculations, we had to turn to aviation specialists who understood how airlines operated, how elements like seat configuration mattered but also where to source, analyse and model that data to help deliver accurate and useful CO2 calculations that were also readily available to be consumed in an API format for our products and services.

This has been accomplished in partnership with RDC Aviation, a dedicated data aggregation provider to airlines and the aviation industry that strives to make aviation data accessible.

RDC works directly with many of the world’s best-known airlines and also more recently, airports and other partners in the travel supply chain. Thanks to their granular data aggregation and analysis, we can show the different CO2 emissions impact for economy vs premium and business cabins onboard the same flight, quickly helping travellers to understand the proportional share of emissions larger seats take up on each flight.

For flights, emissions are calculated using official data from RDC’s multidimensional methodology that provides more accuracy in comparison to other respected sources. RDC takes route and aircraft type plus more granular factors such as engine type, age, fuel burn, and much more to give you a detailed picture. They maintain a comprehensive database of airlines, aircraft and engine types, and seating configurations of more than 35,000 airframes which enables a more granular calculation to be made. RDCs database also includes: • The fuel efficiency of the aircraft type. • The efficiency of the airline – seat capacity and load factor. • Use of Sustainable Alternative Fuels. • Whether the route is part of compliance or regulatory emissions program such as CORSIA, EU ETS, etc. • Whether the operator offsets emissions over and above that which is legally required.

CTM continues to work very closely with RDC to ensure all our routes are covered and we deliver carbon emission estimates that are as accurate as scientifically possible.

The CTM Sport team is committed to creating a more sustainable future for travel through a combination of innovation, strategic guidance for our customers, and investment in sustainable aviation fuels like our partnership with Delta Airlines. If you’d like to see what the power of Lightning can bring to your travel programme, book a demo today.