American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), announced a new agreement with climate tech company CHOOOSE to integrate its carbon emissions calculations across Amex GBT’s travel booking and reporting tools. The aim is to enhance Amex GBT’s sustainability solutions by increasing the precision and consistency of greenhouse gas emissions data and to build architecture for future carbon compensation.
Mark McSpadden, Amex GBT’s VP of product strategy and user experience, said: “Flights are the single largest contributor to business travel emissions, so our first priority is to help our clients keep up with evolving standards for calculating aviation emissions. We are integrating solutions that give clients more choice, enhance our tools with more granular CO2 calculations, and allow us to serve up robust, consistent CO2 data across our suite of booking, tracking and reporting tools. This helps educate travelers and drive real progress in sustainable travel.”
Amex GBT displays carbon emission data in its online booking tool, Neo, to help travelers make educated, sustainable decisions. The integration will replace current calculation mechanisms used in Neo with seamlessly integrated emissions calculations from CHOOOSE.
The new solution will let travel managers select a preferred calculation methodology and seamlessly apply that preference across online booking, mobile app, and itinerary solutions. In Amex GBT reporting tools, travel managers will be able to apply CHOOOSE-powered emissions calculations to trips booked since 2019 for tracking, analyzing and managing carbon footprints.
With the integration, travelers will see consistent trip emissions values in the search results, itineraries, and in the Amex GBT Mobile app for past and future trips. This will provide more visibility into the travelers’ individual carbon footprint, helping them better understand the environmental impact of travel and influence their booking behavior.
Integrating with CHOOOSE gives Amex GBT access to industry-accepted air emissions methodologies. For example, these include ICAO, UK BEIS, US EPA and France ADEME. Amex GBT also integrates with additional data sources such as IATA CO2 Connect based on IATA RECOMMENDED PRACTICE-RP 1726. This will give clients the flexibility to include more criteria such as distance, fuel burn, occupancy, cabin class, and belly cargo for a high degree of accuracy. In addition, where applicable by methodology, customers can select their preferences on radiative forcing and well-to-wake, which is critical for measuring the benefits of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Emissions data for additional travel segments such as rail, car, and hotel will follow. Additional methodologies and features/enhancements will be available over time.
The integration with CHOOOSE is an important step in building the architecture for additional carbon compensation solutions across the Amex GBT portfolio of products and services. Amex GBT clients will have options to compensate for their business travel emissions via a diverse portfolio of climate solutions, integrated seamlessly into their booking and reporting tools. For example, these will include carbon offsets and insets, carbon removals, and emerging decarbonization solutions. CHOOOSE data will also support sustainable meeting and events (M&E) solutions providing a consistent client experience with reliable data across Amex GBT’s services. Egencia will also integrate certain CHOOOSE-powered emissions calculations into its business travel platform, including its reporting tool.
CHOOOSE CEO and founder Andreas Slettvoll said: “We are very happy to support Amex GBT – and the millions of travelers they serve – in creating an industry-leading set of tools to track, understand, and address the carbon footprint associated with business travel. Together, we are taking an end-to-end approach with a deep focus on delivering calculation methodologies in line with the latest industry guidance and seamless access to both immediately available and frontier climate solutions.”
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