Sustainability in corporate travel is stuck between intention and invoice
Companies want to travel more responsibly. The data shows they mostly can't, and the reason is not a lack of will. It's that the numbers underneath are broken.
There is a gap in corporate travel that almost no one talks about honestly, because talking about it honestly is uncomfortable for everyone involved. It is the gap between what companies say about sustainable travel and what they are actually able to do about it. And I want to be clear at the outset about where I think the fault lies, because the easy story is the wrong one. The easy story is that companies do not really care, that sustainability is greenwashing, that the intentions are hollow. I do not believe that. The intentions, in my experience, are mostly real. The problem is that intention runs into a wall, and the wall is made of bad data.
Let me start with the intention, because the evidence that it exists is strong.
The intention is real
Nearly 60% of business travelers say they are concerned about the carbon footprint of their work trips, and that concern is influencing how they book and behave. Regulators have made the intention mandatory in large parts of the world: under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, companies must now disclose Scope 3 emissions, which brings flights, hotels, and ground transport under direct scrutiny. California’s SB 253 will mandate Scope 3 disclosure, including business travel, for large companies doing business in the state, with first reports due in 2027. The pressure is real, it is rising, and it is coming from travelers, from regulators, and from boards simultaneously. By any measure, the will to act exists.
Now look at what companies are actually doing, and the picture collapses.
And then the picture collapses
The GBTA benchmark found that only 14% of companies have set a carbon budget for business travel, and just 7% have established internal carbon fees. Read those two numbers against the 60% of travelers who say they care, and you have the gap in a single line. The concern is nearly universal. The concrete mechanisms to act on it are rare. Something is stopping the intention from becoming action, and it is worth understanding what, because the obvious explanations are wrong.
It is not cost, primarily. It is not even political will, though that fluctuates. The thing that stops most companies from managing travel emissions is more boring and more fundamental than either: they cannot measure them accurately enough to manage them. You cannot set a carbon budget for something you cannot count, and most companies, when they look closely, discover they cannot count their travel emissions with anything like the precision the goal requires.
Here is why, and this is the part that connects to everything I have written about data in this newsletter.
The wall is made of four systems
Corporate travel data flows through at least four separate systems: the TMC, the online booking tool, direct rail bookings, and the expense management platform. Each of these applies its own emission factors, its own distance assumptions, its own treatment of cabin class. A flight booked through the TMC might be calculated with one methodology. A rail ticket bought on a personal card and expensed might be estimated from spend rather than distance. A hotel stay might not be calculated at all. The result is not a clean emissions number with a margin of error. It is four partial pictures that do not reconcile, built on methodologies that produce, by the industry’s own admission, considerably different assessments of the same trip.
This is the wall. A company sets out, in good faith, to reduce its travel emissions. It needs a baseline to set a target against. It goes to assemble that baseline and finds that the number depends entirely on which system you ask and which methodology you trust, and that the off-channel bookings, the trips booked outside the official tools, do not show up at all, creating a reporting gap precisely where the emissions are least visible. The company now faces a choice it never wanted: report a number it knows is shaky, or delay action until the data is better, which in practice means indefinitely. Most choose a third option, which is to make a vague public commitment and quietly never build the carbon budget, because the carbon budget would require a number they do not have. Hence 60% who care and 14% who act.
I find this genuinely important, and not only for environmental reasons, though those matter. I find it important because it is a near-perfect illustration of a principle that runs through this entire field: that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and that the measurement problem is almost always a data problem in disguise. The sustainability conversation in corporate travel has spent years on the wrong layer. It has debated offsets versus reductions, SAF versus rail, carbon fees versus carbon budgets. Those are real debates. But they are debates about what to do with a number that most companies do not actually have. You cannot choose between offsetting and reducing your emissions if you cannot reliably say what your emissions are.
Let me be fair to the difficulty, because it would be easy to make this sound simpler than it is.
In fairness to the difficulty
Aviation emissions are genuinely hard to calculate well. The underlying problem is large and getting larger: global commercial aviation CO2 rose roughly 30% in just six years before the pandemic, and commercial traffic is growing several times faster than fuel efficiency is improving. The methodologies for attributing a share of a flight’s emissions to a specific traveler in a specific cabin are contested even among experts. Sustainable aviation fuel, the most-discussed lever, currently makes up well under one percent of jet fuel consumption, which means that for now it is more a future hope than a present solution, and accounting for SAF credits through book-and-claim arrangements adds yet another layer of methodological complexity. None of this is easy. I am not pretending the data problem is merely a matter of plugging in the right software.
But I am saying that the data problem is the binding constraint, the thing that has to be solved first, before any of the more interesting debates can produce action rather than rhetoric. And here the sustainability challenge turns out to be the same challenge I keep coming back to from different angles: the cost of fragmentation. The reason a company cannot count its travel emissions is the same reason it cannot see its true travel spend, cannot apply its policy consistently, cannot deploy an AI agent it trusts. The data lives in disconnected systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and every disconnection is a place where accuracy leaks away.
This reframes what good looks like, and it reframes it in a way I find clarifying.
What actually unlocks action
The companies that will actually move on sustainable travel, as opposed to talking about it, are not the ones with the boldest public commitments. They are the ones that have solved the unglamorous data problem underneath. When a company has full-channel, real-time visibility into its travel, the emissions number stops being a guess assembled from four irreconcilable sources and becomes something auditable. And once it is auditable, the whole frozen conversation thaws. You can set a real carbon budget, because you can measure against it. You can give a traveler a per-trip carbon figure at the moment of booking, because you can calculate it consistently. You can build a rail-first prompt for the corridors where rail beats flying, because you can see the corridors. The interventions everyone has been debating become possible the moment the measurement becomes trustworthy, and not one moment before.
This is the through-line that connects sustainability to everything else a well-built travel program does, and it is why I do not think of sustainability as a separate module bolted onto the side of travel management. The same connected data that lets you find the cheapest fair fare, apply policy automatically, and reconcile an expense without human effort is the data that lets you calculate an emission accurately. Sustainability is not a feature you add. It is a byproduct of having gotten the data right, available to any program that did the foundational work and unavailable to any program that did not, no matter how sincere its intentions.
I want to end by returning to the gap, because I think it deserves more honesty than the industry usually gives it.
The gap deserves honesty
When a company announces a sustainable travel commitment and then, two years later, has quietly not built the carbon budget to deliver it, the temptation is to read cynicism into the failure. Sometimes that is right. But far more often, in what I have seen, the failure is not cynicism. It is a company that meant it, ran into the data wall, and did not have the foundation to get over it. The intention was real. The invoice, the actual mess of four systems and incompatible methodologies and invisible off-channel bookings, was where the intention died.
That is why the title of this piece is what it is. Sustainability in corporate travel is not stuck because companies do not care. The data on traveler concern and regulatory pressure says they increasingly do, or are increasingly forced to. It is stuck between intention and invoice: between a genuine desire to travel more responsibly and a measurement reality that makes responsible travel impossible to manage, prove, or improve. The bridge between those two things is not a louder commitment or a better offset. It is connected, trustworthy data, the same bridge that every other hard problem in this industry turns out to require.
Fix that, and sustainability stops being a statement a company makes and becomes a thing a company can actually do. Leave it unfixed, and the gap between intention and invoice will keep swallowing good intentions, one unbuilt carbon budget at a time.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.