Spotnana partners with Thrust Carbon to drive innovation in sustainable travel

As many of you know, I have been a major advocate of sustainable travel for many years. In fact, I posted my first public travel carbon disclosure statement in January 2019, when I shared my 2018 carbon emission performance in chapter 1 of my “Green Travel Odyssey” saga.

Shortly after, I met Mark and Kit, the two founders of UK-based startup Thrust Carbon. In February 2020, I became their official strategic advisor, with the clear goal of helping them create a product relevant to the corporate travel sector.

Good things can take time

Fast forward to 2024. Today, I am incredibly proud and excited to announce that Spotnana has developed an integration with Thrust Carbon for air, hotel, car, and rail bookings. This will enable our mutual customers to apply the same carbon calculation models across the entire travel workflow, from the initial search and book to the post-trip analysis.

Due to the urgency and importance of tackling the climate crisis, the travel industry already has many solution providers offering a range of carbon calculators and reporting tools. Most of these systems have lived relatively separate from the travel policy engines and the search and booking processes used by corporate travelers.

Our new partnership changes this. 

We are creating a deep API-based integration between our two cloud-native platforms designed to move data back and forth instantly whenever it is relevant and, more importantly, enable dynamic automated rules to be triggered when a greener travel option is available.

Given Thrust Carbon’s exciting announcement just last week about being assured to the new ISO 14083 standard, the potential benefits for our mutual customers are significant. Being ISO 14083 assured gives global travel program managers increased confidence that Thrust Carbon’s calculations are accurate and will be accepted by regulators. 

Furthermore, Spotnana and Thrust Carbon are partnering to develop cutting-edge innovation that will help corporations reduce their carbon emissions further through new capabilities designed to:

• Educate travelers, travel managers, and procurement teams.
• Apply strategic financial principles to drive sustainable travel initiatives.
• Reward the suppliers who are driving sustainability in the travel industry.
• Provide real-time flow of data from initial search to post-trip carbon analysis.
• Enable intelligent messaging (aka nudging) directly into the booking process.

Who can use these new capabilities?

Given that the new capabilities require access to both Spotnana and Thrust Carbon, the benefits will only be available to our mutual customers, which include companies who have contracted with Thrust Carbon for their Carbon Intelligence Platform and contracted with a TMC using Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service platform.

I am excited to share that our new partnership ensures the same rules and capabilities are applied and available for 100% of travel bookings. Since Spotnana provides a single, unified platform for travelers and agents, TMCs using Spotnana will be able to apply the integration’s benefits for both online and offline bookings. Travel managers will also gain access to a real-time, global view of emissions data across their entire travel program. 

We look forward to sharing more details about our new partnership as new capabilities are released.

Can we create the perfect green trip?

The typical difference in carbon emissions between the newest plane and the oldest plane on a one-hour flight is around 25%. By nudging travelers or creating incentives to select the lowest-emission flight and hotel options, we believe it is possible to drive real change rapidly.

In the next few years, I anticipate that CO2 emissions per day of travel will become a new KPI in global corporate travel programs. Similar to how we currently discuss cost per mile flown or average room rate per night, this new KPI will increase the focus on reducing carbon emissions per trip and moving closer to the 2050 industry-wide goal of net zero emissions from aviation.

Welcome to the dawn of a greener travel management program powered by Spotnana and Thrust Carbon!