Business Travel: Going Sustainable

I did a little totting up and I discovered that before Covid-19 darkened our doors, I used to take around 100 flights per year for business purposes. It felt very much like a necessary thing but I knew it was bad for the planet and, when I was grounded, I realised it was bad for me, too. I made myself a promise not to return to that level of intensity.

Thanks to the incredible people developing, distributing and administering vaccinations around the world, travel is becoming possible again, so when I was invited to Hamburg for The NEXT conference, I really wanted to go – I’ve been twice before, and rate it highly. I very quickly decided to travel from London to Hamburg by train (and back), to fulfil that promise.

Hamburg is a little tricky to get to on the train, so my route involved a few transfers: London > Brussels > Aachen > Duisburg > Hamburg. It was scheduled to be 9h15m travel time (as opposed to a 1h30m flight). While I knew there were risks around the connections, I was prepared to do it anyway, partly for my own personal reasons and partly as an experiment into more environmentally responsible travel. In the event, one delay at Aachen knocked things out of whack, so I rerouted via Dortmund instead of Duisburg and finished with a 12-hour travel time. It brought with it a level of anxiety and a bit of thinking-on-the-fly, which you can no doubt imagine – and it meant wearing a face mask for 12 solid hours, which certainly increased my empathy for those who must do so regularly. (Interestingly, I didn’t see a single person in Germany without a properly worn mask. In honesty, it made me reflect on my own country in a less-than-favourable light.)

I had envisaged working on the trains – I quite like working on trains and I can usually be very productive – but I found that my access to the internet was patchy, which limited both my focus and my ability to get much done. When I lost the will to work, I tapped into Netflix but found that what I really wanted was a book. With the frustrations caused by the connectivity and the broken concentration, I just didn’t want to stare at the screen anymore.

There and back meant being away from home two nights more than a plane trip. The journey wasn’t easy, but it was definitely worth it. I met the most interesting people in Hamburg, and had fun and fascinating conversations with people like Benedict Evans, Beata Rosenthal, David Mattin and Matthias Shrader, to name a few. It was a genuine joy to be back in an environment where we could exchange ideas in person, and even attend an award-winning art exhibition by Tom Sachs, “Space Program: Rare Earths”.

The benefits of going were immense and I’m glad I’ve started looking into how I can make my business travel better for the planet, but we have so much work to do to help people make more sustainable choices. It’s difficult for many reasons: quite often it’s more expensive, it usually comes at some personal cost, and it’s incredibly difficult to find the information that tells us what our best options are.

Admittedly, this journey was complicated, but finding out the carbon footprint of my options was so hard. https://www.ecopassenger.org was useful, if complicated. Instead of figures relating to particulate matter and nonmethane hydrocarbons, what we need is a very simple rating system, e.g., 1 = excellent, 5 = terrible. We need some standardisation that makes these choices more straightforward.

We shouldn’t have to work so hard to come to good decisions. It’s something we’re spending a lot of time thinking about at Accenture Interactive. There are five factors (govt, the law, employees, shareholders and the children of CEOs) ?which taken together are much stronger than consumers’ voices that are (rightly) pressuring businesses to take meaningful, determined action on sustainability, so it’s up to businesses and brands to lead consumers to a more sustainable world. It won’t be easy, but we’re working on strategies to help our clients do it.

I'm going by train across Europe again this week :). But flying back for a long planned dinner with old friends that I just don't want to miss :/