Sounding Off: The challenge of reducing travel in the travel industry

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered on our site that week.

Ask someone why they have spent most of their career in the travel industry and their eyes light up. The answer is often something along the lines of "great people, no day is the same, there’s no better industry, get to the travel a lot."

Despite the sometimes harsh reality of queues at airports and disappointment with accommodation, most of us still love dreaming about our next trip and adding destinations to the bucket list.

But it’s not sustainable - at least not from an environmental point of view.

That is a very difficult conversation to have, especially in corporate travel management, as Helen Hodgkinson of corporate travel consultancy Festive Road points out.

How can travel companies, in leisure and the corporate end of the business, promote the potential demise of the industry if people don’t travel less and take a more sustainable approach to travel?

Perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope from the unlikely quarter that is the world of the corporate giants.

It’s probably naive to think there isn’t an element of greenwashing to it, but if CEOs from companies such as Microsoft and investment giants such as BlackRock are transparent about their plans for sustainable growth, then there’s hope for some sort of movement from the top down.

Eric Bailey, global director of travel at VentureSource and payment at Microsoft, says what’s good for business, especially in the short-term, has to be secondary compared to the bigger picture.

The message is that the long-term future of the planet is more important and, as he succinctly puts it, “global devastation is not good for anybody.”

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, must be thinking along similar lines with his letter to CEOs on the company’s plan to put sustainability at the core of its investments and withdraw from others that present a “high sustainability-related risk.”

He goes on to talk about a “fundamental reshaping of finance” as the markets catch up in terms of awareness of the impact of climate change on economic growth.

Money usually talks, and BlackRock’s assets under management in Q3 last year were said to amount to $6.96 trillion.

Presented in that light, it seems a little disingenuous of the U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to suggest climate change activist Greta Thunberg should study economics before talking about fossil fuel divestment.

So, yes, these conversations are difficult to have across all industries, including travel, but it’s time to have them.