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Socially Responsible Corporate Travel Still Growing

Posted in Blog, The Wire by AirPlus US Team
Tags: Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, The Wire

Buyers want details about supplier practices, but may not be driven to take action on the information.

Despite the economic recession, the concept of corporate social responsibility is still alive and well in many organizations. From an enterprise perspective, CSR initiatives have become a strategic way to support the local communities in which companies operate, as well as a way to build consumer, client and employee loyalty. For some companies, travel management is an integral part of CSR efforts. In a recent online survey fielded by AirPlus International, travel buyers revealed how much influence CSR practices had on their buying decisions and/or supplier partnerships.

Among 76 travel buyers responding to the survey, nearly 14 percent included CSR criteria in their RFPs for airlines, while 15.5 percent included these criteria in their hotel RFPs (the largest percentage among supplier categories suggested). More than 12 percent required car rental companies to respond to CSR criteria, whereas criteria for the payment category lagged all others with just 7.3 percent currently requiring that information.
Those percentages are set to change dramatically in the next 12 months among companies surveyed.

When it comes to the type of CSR initiatives travel buyers expect to see in their suppliers, carbon emissions reductions – or, “green” strategies – are most in demand. More than 60 percent of respondents indicated that they expect travel suppliers to have green initiatives in place, whether that means a recycling or waste diversion program, water reclamation, use of biofuels or even fleet maintenance. About one-third of respondents expected their suppliers to participate in some kind of charitable giving activities.

The AirPlus survey was fielded primarily to North American companies that tend to lag their European counterparts in their approach to CSR – especially to the environment. Meetings are perhaps an exception to that general rule, where zero-carbon conferences are often the goal for large corporations. Especially for meetings, companies tend to work with specific suppliers to achieve discrete goals for the event, but can influence suppliers to continue CSR processes far beyond the duration of three- to five-day gathering. Indeed, it is a sign of program maturity for a travel manager to engage suppliers in mutual CSR improvement and work together to make a difference to their respective communities and build CSR accountability in the corporate travel industry as a whole.