TravelPerk launches carbon impact reporting and offsetting

In what it calls the first step in an effort to become a “sustainable travel agent,” Barcelona-based business travel platform TravelPerk is launching a new solution, GreenPerk.

Employees of TravelPerks’ 3,500 business customers – including companies such as GetYourGuide, Transferwise and Farfetch - will now see data about the carbon footprint of their flights, hotel stays and ground transportation options as they are making booking decisions in the platform.

Travel managers at those companies will then have the option to offset that impact for a fee of about €27 for every ton of CO2 emitted, which TravelPerk says equates to about 4% of the cost of a business trip. That money, minus a small fee TravelPerk will keep to cover administrative costs, will go to Atmosfair, a non-profit that works with local partners that provide United Nations-endorsed carbon mitigation projects.

“This is a drive from us to become the first in a new category of sustainable travel agents,” says Ross McNairn, TravelPerk’s chief product officer.

“Many of our companies are coming under pressure not just from their workforce but from the wider political climate.

“[But] many of them actually struggle to really calculate the footprint of their travel… and the other big area that they were struggling with was to work out the best way of offsetting.”

McNairn says GreenPerk solves both of these issues by providing a free, instant view of the carbon impact of a trip - which he says may encourage travelers to choose options with a smaller footprint - and by offering one-click offsetting through a non-profit that TravelPerk has vetted.

“If we get this wrong it actually does something quite negative for companies that are using the program,” McNairn says.

“So we went through a very extensive process where we picked out a number of factors… we [looked at] how they calculated their carbon offset in the first place. We then checked the types of projects they were offsetting with. We looked at their methodology for doing that. We then checked to see whether other third parties were auditing or verifying the projects they were working on. Part of the issue here is there is no reliable third-party certification for what is good carbon offset in travel. We are taking it upon ourselves effectively to try to create, with Atmosfair, that gold standard.”

Companies that choose to pay for offsets will get regular updates from TravelPerk on how that money is being used, and they’ll receive information they can share with their employees and customers about their participation in the program.

TravelPerk has been testing GreenPerk with some clients since January, and McNairn says, “They are very, very happy. Demand is beyond what we could have hoped for.”

As part of this launch, TravelPerk will also now pay to offset the impact of its employees’ travel.