Claire Turner on sustainability in corporate travel

Claire Turner: The inflection point is going to be when carbon has a cost each time, and I think it will be sooner than people realize. Whether it’s an internal levy that a particularly forward thinking sustainability department imposes, or whether it’s externally imposed by the government. by a regulator, the second and fourth phases of CSRD, for example, it’s going to come.

Johnny Thorsen: So welcome to today’s edition of the Spotnana podcast series, where we are inviting leading individuals in the global travel industry for an open conversation about things going on in the travel industry today. And I’m really happy. I’m proud to invite Claire Turner to join me today.

Claire Turner joins as an individual representing Claire Turner, but she’s also the former global travel manager for HSBC and has a deep experience in managing large global corporate travel programs. Welcome Claire, thanks a lot for joining us.

Claire Turner: Thanks for having me, Johnny. It’s great to be here.

Johnny Thorsen: You’ve obviously now been outside large corporate travel for a little while. Any immediate reflections on anything that’s surprised you, good or bad, suddenly stepping away? 

Claire Turner: Yeah, I think it’s been lots of different emotions, lots of different reasons and reflections, and just feels quite radical to have taken a break for about five minutes in my career.

So I quite enjoyed that. And after, I think it’s only been two and a bit months, so I’m really excited to engage more deeply with the travel and sustainability aspects and seeing that some of the stuff we innovated at HSBC has been quite leading. And yeah, it turns out I do have some views on the topic.

Johnny Thorsen: And not surprisingly, you lasted almost one minute before you, you said sustainability the first time, because I know it’s one of the topics that that you really focus on like myself. We are going to have a kind of a deeper dive into the sustainability area today than we’ve had in some of the other sessions.

I would really like to just start asking you, did you feel you achieved what you could in the HSBC program in terms of sustainability, or did you walk out of there feeling that there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement? 

Claire Turner: I think we’ve gotten a really solid foundation. There at that program, I think the organization’s really genuine in its broader commitments.

And I think one of the strengths we really had was it was super aligned to the wider sustainability goals of the organization and the departments that were running it. travel doing our own thing which I think was really beneficial, but there’s still a long way to go for all organizations.

We do some good stuff with carbon budgets. And I have been surprised looking out, into the industry more broadly now that’s still an area lots of people haven’t really got to yet. So some good lessons to share, I think. 

Johnny Thorsen: And that’s one of the interesting observations. I would say after 2023 where a lot of good things happened, a lot of progress was made in understanding and awareness, but would you say that we are at a point where companies are actively changing travel policy because of sustainability? Or is it more of a measurement kind of game right now? 

Claire Turner: Yeah, I think I see a lot of organizations who are willing to change their direction, but perhaps not ready. If I could summarize it in that way, I think a lot of the policy relating to sustainable travel is quite broad brush statements, which are really important.

Don’t take unnecessary trips. Consider the environmental impact of your business travel. All great, but they’re very high level and generic. I think we need to support the industry and innovate to get beyond those general statements into something a bit more actionable for travelers.

Cause I’m quite stubbornly optimistic about travelers. I think people generally want to travel. Want to do the right thing. People aren’t ignorant about sustainability. They want to make a good choice when they need to travel. I think the purposeful travel message is well embedded. So I think people don’t take unnecessary trips.

One, it is too expensive. And two, people have had that very personal experience over the last few years about working differently. So now I feel the focus needs to shift onto what can I actually do? To make a better choice and have that reflected in my company’s numbers. So I do see some good pockets actually within travel policies.

So particularly when it comes to areas like rail switching that works well in Europe intra Europe travel that’s well suited. I think there’s probably some good potential in the domestic China rail market as well, that’s perhaps a bit unexplored, but realistically, that’s going to be a very small proportion of your typical large corporate travel program.

Really we’ve got to tackle the air travel in terms of policy to move forward and make some big scale changes EVs and ground, I think again, that’s more mature, but similarly pretty small proportion. 

Johnny Thorsen: Yeah. And that is one of the interesting kinds of dilemmas here, right?

It’s relatively easy to make changes on behavior on hotels and car rental, but like you said, it’s a small impact. Nevertheless, it is important because it’s part of the education process. So what are you doing right now in terms of keeping yourself connected with the industry? Are you studying? Are you looking for something else? 

Claire Turner: I’ve gone back to school. So I’m at Imperial College business school doing a sustainability leadership program, which I’m really enjoying and it’s given me a good lens outside of travel to look out and then back down again. And then also working with developing my knowledge of SAF.

So really starting to get into some of the technical aspects of sustainable aviation fuel and maturing that market and how that can interplay in the next year. 20, 30 years what action can we take now as an industry to really get us into the point where the demand and the supply is matching the demand that we are going to need at price point, we’re all willing to pay.

So that’s where I see the big opportunity and what I’m personally most interested in at the moment. 

Johnny Thorsen: So where do you see yourself going if you step back into a role remaining on the buyer side becoming an expert that can help other buyers or being a supplier? 

Claire Turner: Yeah, so I really love to help people make things fit for them.

So some sort of advisory consultancy or actually I think it’s suppliers as well want to understand how buyers think and where their frustrations are potentially. Yeah, bridging some of those gaps is great. what I can see myself doing in the future. 

Johnny Thorsen: I definitely think you will be in demand.

Your background means you can step in and help a lot of people. And now that you’re adding new layers of knowledge you, because most travel managers, and if you want to comment from your own role, right? They struggle to find time to Understand and get involved in the new sustainability challenge.

How did you manage that? Did you get time allocation or did you carve out time? 

Claire Turner: It’s just such a busy role, being a travel manager, right? It’s overwhelming at times to balance all of those. And it was actually one of the motivations for making a change was I wanted to spend more of my time focused on this because I think it can really amplify a lot of benefits and where we need to be focusing our time and attention.

I want to set policies of lowest logical carbon, not lowest logical fare. And I don’t see anybody doing it yet. So I want to figure out how to do it. And that’s what I want to work on. So when we were thinking about the conversation today, I was thinking, what would it take to move from lowest logical fare to lowest logical carbon?

And I reflect that I actually joined the travel industry and took the role in travel post-pandemic, as I thought that we could do things really differently, and I still do believe that today. I think we need to have a lot more granularity of data. And I actually believe we get a bit hung up on data sometimes and being perfect.

But more visibility of the different carbon emissions of each option. Because I think, if the price is right, and you should be negotiating good prices, you should only be working with suppliers who are committed to their sustainability. The marketplace that travelers are shopping in should be good value.

Therefore, why can’t you drive the individual selection of each trip component, including for air, on the carbon? But without fuel-burn-based methodologies, without seeing, everyone’s got two or three green leafs, on their hotel program, which is great. I’m not trying to undermine any of that, but why can’t we know the carbon per occupied room?

Johnny Thorsen: Yes. 

Claire Turner: So when I’m flying to Denmark to come visit you when we meet up on travels, and I’ve got three good options. From price, why can’t my final decision be driven by which one’s the more efficient? Now, you’re always going to have the three cost, carbon, and experience elements in balance, but I don’t think we have enough visibility of what each carbon or environmental impact is and how the options compare against each other.

Johnny Thorsen: And you just said several things that are really aligned with at least the way we’re looking at attacking the sustainability problem, because there’s no right or wrong, but there’s a real good goal in making it easy for travel managers to define and run the program that makes sense for their company.

That might be extreme carbon focused, or it might be extreme cost focused. But just the balance between the two, right? We probably are still today in a world where the lowest carbon flight might even cost more because it’s a newer plane. It’s more attractive, but at some point, politicians will probably turn that around and say, you will pay more for a higher polluting carbon flight.

Claire Turner: The inflection point is going to be when carbon has a cost each time. And I think it will be sooner than people realize whether it’s a internal levy that a particularly forward thinking sustainability department imposes or whether it’s externally imposed by a regulator, Seconds and fourth phases of CSRD, for example it’s going to come even the third way it’s going to come is when we get to all of these public net-zero commitments, because people are going to have to pay for the gap, their residual emissions to be net zero, they’re going to have to offset in some way those residual emissions. 

So the cost is coming. So I think there’s some really great strategies that are super available to implement. What about a shadow price of carbon to use that as an awareness and education tool for what it really costs to take some of these trips? And it’s not just and I think we need to move beyond, go or don’t go.

Johnny Thorsen: Exactly. Yep. 

Claire Turner: I think CFOs and partners at home make those calls, right? Whether you go or you don’t go. And actually its travelers can make the decision as to which flight and which hotel. 

Johnny Thorsen: Yep. And if you have a carbon budget suddenly you become more focused because like any other financial budget, now you want to stay within the budget.

And you can only consume until you have burned on the budget.

Claire Turner: Can I ask you a question here, Johnny, turn the tables around travel policy. Would you mandate the class of travel? 

Johnny Thorsen: No, I don’t think I would mandate. I think I would say that you have a budget of X. So if you want to have 100 travel days per year, then you fly in economy.

If you only want to have 30 travel days per year, then you can go business. You burn more carbon, so you get less travel days for a given carbon budget. And that each department owner decides how they want to use the carbon because you said it before, lowest logical carbon.

There’s no way to date to come up with that number in a kind of, I would say, fully-tested, credible way. But we are playing around with two things. One is what we call lost carbon savings. So you pick something, but there was a lower carbon option there. You didn’t pick that. So just like we can have, lost savings in the money terms, we can have lost carbon saving that is possible.

And then we can have a very basic benchmark of the average carbon per travel day in this company is 150 kilos. You’re currently at 210. So you’re actually above that small nudging. You don’t even need a policy, right? Nudging is extremely powerful when it comes to advising people what not to do.

Claire Turner: Absolutely. And as I said, people are independent grownups. They can make good choices. They just need to know how they’re performing against their peers, right? So if you are blowing your carbon budget and you are not being as efficient as your arch rival in the next sales team, then it’s going to motivate your behavior.

So I think there’s some really straightforward things to do in terms of exposing some of that down to a more granular level than I think traditional reporting gets you to. 

Johnny Thorsen: I’ve been at two airline conferences over the last two weeks. One was an IATA event. One was a UATP event and sustainability clearly had a much bigger presence at the conference than I have ever seen before. So inside the online community, it definitely looks like they’re also waking up to the reality call. But an interesting dilemma was raised and I’m just curious how you would have managed that in, in your HSBC time. So I book economy. I get upgraded. How should I count that carbon? What I bought or what I flew? What was your guiding principle on that one?

Claire Turner: Ultimately, I don’t think it matters as long as you’re consistent. 

Johnny Thorsen: So you can decide one or the other. Yeah.

Because those are the dilemmas that are starting to surface now as people. Get more focused on accurate accounting for it, which is great. You said it earlier, it doesn’t have to be perfect right now. It’s more the fact that we keep moving and improving. 

Claire Turner: Yeah, absolutely. So people have asked me before that, how did you set a carbon budget when you implemented that, and it’s really easy to get tied up in the methodology. I just cut it in half. I cut our pre-pandemic emissions in half. And I said, there’s your carbon budget. It’s half of what we did before. Let’s see how we get on. And it was simpler and better. It just started the conversation.

It started things going, and I think you’ve got to refine your methodology as you go and re-baseline as you do. Potentially. As well you have parallel, so you might have something you publicly disclosed that’s your kind of formal kind of consistent methodology over time and experiment with a shadow new methodology, use that for awareness and decision make, and then nudging, as you said before, and then when you’ve proven the new methodology works, then you can update your public disclosure when you’ve tried it. So I think yeah, I’d encourage clients, viewers, anyone interested to have the confidence to experiment because otherwise we will hit 2030 before we know it.

Johnny Thorsen: I think that was incredibly good advice you just gave there, right?. To have a public facing number that you feel confident. I can stand by this. I can defend it or explain it. 

Claire Turner: Second, first, third line of defense, stand up with the greenwashing risk. Publicity is real for organizations. We have to have real robustness of our numbers. But yeah, I think having a sandbox almost to play in separately I think is the smart way to go. 

Johnny Thorsen: It’s also really interesting. We’ve had a few Spotnana customers who are in engineering slash energy companies and for their own part, I’m not saying they’re ignorant, but for them, sustainability is not important, but for their business, it is, because their customers are now demanding that they show evidence.

So that’s another driver that’s coming, right? If you are a customer, you can literally make a difference by demanding that your suppliers have evidence of their performance. 

Claire Turner: Absolutely. Yeah. And you see it a lot in code of conducts as well, becoming really mandatory across the board. So organizations like Ecovadas putting some good standards in place there that I think travel buyers can leverage.

You have to be sustainable. In these core metrics to become a preferred supplier. That’s an entry level requirement now. So I see that there’s a lot of maturity, not just in travel. That’s really starting to come through. 

Johnny Thorsen: We are already coming to the end here, but now that you are out in the open without any kind of enterprise rules, can you say what would you see as the biggest area of quick improvement, i. e. reduction of carbon, is there something that stands out for you that this is where you should focus your energy right now? 

Claire Turner: I think it’s about making moves in SAF now, for later. Because it’s not going to happen without the industry signaling demand now. So it’s like any kind of offset project, right?

You might invest in the tree now. It’s not going to get back the carbon for 10, 15 years, right? So a similar approach, approach there. So I think that’s sort of strategic. I think the tactical move is to engage your travelers with the more granular data and have that methodology that reflects improvement.

Because it’s no point talking about sustainability with your travelers. Yeah, the number never changes and it’s all just tied to the cost. So being able to demonstrate the difference between flight A, B or C from a sustainability point of view. Now, whether you do that by a fuel burn methodology shift, or you do it by comparing your top airlines overall sustainability performance by the CO2 per revenue passenger kilometer. 

It’s a mouthful, but it’s a good metric. Those kinds of things where those stubbornly optimistic travelers, the travelers who I’m stubbornly optimistic in, who want to make a good choice, are actually equipped to do it.

Johnny Thorsen: Who do you think should develop and deliver the technology to manage this? Should the buyers do this on their own? If they are large buyers, should the TMCs or other players in the industry provide it? Or are we looking at the specialist solutions that you put in parallel with your travel technology? What are your thoughts? 

Claire Turner: I think everyone has to play their part. And again, I’m agnostic. I think the TMCs can provide it. I think independent tech can provide it. We should all be challenging each other. I think where travel buyers can make the biggest difference, I don’t think they need to do it by themselves.

I think that’s not the best use of their time. My view is the best use of their time is holding the suppliers to account. Everybody should be getting a baseline now, whether it’s in a quarterly business review for your airline suppliers, whether it is hotel suppliers, whatever it is, your, just your general baseline of your emissions per department that you look after.

The data is one thing now. What do we do with it? That would be my challenge back out to travel managers is you’ve actually got some information now. What are you going to manage with it? How are you going to, I don’t know, maybe you spotlight the supplier who’s made the most progress over the last six months and you do a big preferencing campaign in your OBT from a environmental perspective, like how can you actually drive change?

And action based on the information that you can now get. That would be where I would want my travel managers to be focused. 

Johnny Thorsen: Yeah. And then I would say I’m yet to meet a travel buyer who has changed the status of a preferred supplier to being non-preferred because of sustainability performance.

Claire Turner: Do you think that will happen this year? It’s a journey and then whatever analogy and candidly, we talk about it’s moving along together, right? I would never imply or suggest that you would not work with a supplier because of their sustainability performance.

What I would highly recommend is that you talk to your supplier about their sustainability. Remember what they said last time and make sure it’s better the next time. And keep the pressure on in that way. And then you’re moving forward together. But yeah, I do, I want to, I am very interested to know what the inflection point will be.

My prediction is when there is a painful cost to each ton of carbon. That’s when we’ll start to see more decisions.

Johnny Thorsen: I think you’re right. If a hundred dollars or a hundred Euros or, whichever government number is slowly being defined when that really makes its way into the airline ticket price and the hotel room price, that’s when this will be an active policy.

And hopefully a few companies will move before that. But that’s probably the inflection point out there. So Claire, thanks a lot for joining. I want to ask you at the end, are you already now available for buyers to reach out and ask for your help or are you in full education mode?

Claire Turner: So yeah, I’ve got my, what’s it, the hat, the square hat on and I’m open and I really love talking about this topic. I think it’s really important. Yeah, I’m really interested to talk with anyone who’s got a strong view, particularly if you completely disagree with me. Please knock on my door and we would, I’d love to, to speak.

Johnny Thorsen: So there you go. If you want to have a chat either to learn more or to challenge Claire, then reach out to her. And I’m sure you will have a great conversation. Thanks a lot, Claire, for joining, I really enjoyed this conversation. And it’s people like you who understand the bio side, the biodynamics and can help define the strategies.

You are so important for this transition we’re going through because a few airlines Use the term, it’s an existential threat, sustainability to the business of flying. So some allied people are starting to speak that language, which would be impossible a few years ago. So we’re getting close to some kind of inflection here.

Claire Turner: Absolutely. It’s really, it’s a really exciting time. Johnny, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for the platform and the opportunity. 

Johnny Thorsen: You’re welcome. Thanks a lot.