Sabre Tackles Emissions With Google Tool

Travel technology company Sabre on Sept. 24 announced it had partnered with Google and was using Google’s “travel impact model” to measure past carbon emissions. Sabre used the model to measure its 2023 emissions from business travel and to look for ways to reduce them. The company also is looking to see how it can use its technology to consistently display sustainability information at the time of booking. In addition, the global distribution system provider in March this year joined the Travalyst coalition, a sustainable travel organization founded by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. BTN senior editor Donna M. Airoldi spoke with Sabre global sustainability director Jessica Matthias about the company’s sustainability efforts for itself and its customers. Edited excerpts follow.

BTN: Isn’t the sustainability team at Sabre relatively new?

Jessica Matthias: The team was created just over a year ago in July. It was becoming increasingly evident that we needed a formal sustainability team because it’s something that I was sort of doing alongside my day job. And when our new CEO, Kurt Ekert, [started] last spring, one of his priorities was sustainability. 

The priorities for us have been setting a strategy for Sabre, finding where we should be in the sustainability space, the role we should play, the appetite among Sabre’s leadership team and technology teams for sustainability. And then putting in motion a new framework, which we are launching [Sept. 30] in our sustainability report, called Travel Positive. It’s a three-pillar approach: people, planet and prosperity. The idea is that that will guide our work in the sustainability space and enable us to set meaningful goals. We’ll be building on that as we move forward.

BTN: In using Google’s travel impact model on Sabre’s 2023 corporate travel to measure emissions, what did you learn?

Matthias: Google’s model gave us a total overall footprint. [Emissions from business travel were just over 6,000 cubic meters] for the whole year for all of our employees. [Sabre’s total carbon footprint was about 93,500 cubic meters for 2023.] But the main recommendation that they gave us was to focus on our most common long-haul routes. Our long-haul travel accounts for just one in five flights that our team members take, but it equates to around 77 percent of our total flight emissions. 

BTN: How do you plan to use that information?

Matthias: The data told us there were a couple of really quite common [long-haul] routes for us to fly, and [without] even changing cabin class or flying less, but flying different flights at different times of day could save up to 850 kilograms of CO2 per passenger per flight. That’s based on a number of factors like aircraft type, typical load factor, seating configurations and a host more criteria that the travel impact model brings into the equation when they’re calculating those emissions.

The other factor was looking at direct versus indirect flights. Most of the time, the direct routes are less polluting than the indirect routes. The travel impact model calculates quite a significant difference most of the time between direct and indirect flights. Just by encouraging our employees to take those direct flights where possible, we can also make quite significant [emissions reductions]. 

We can also consider building that into our travel policy and into our corporate booking tool to prompt people when they go and book a flight. …  It’s not something that we currently do—we’ve only just got this data—but the next stage will be to look at this data and consider these options.

BTN: What in Sabre’s travel policy are you considering tweaking based on the case study results?

Matthias: I think we’ll consider the recommendations that Google has set out. And it’s particularly relevant for us as we’re committed to setting science-based targets. … We just submitted our commitment letter a few weeks back. … In the next 24 months, we’ll be working out what those targets will be and getting them validated by the [Science-Based Targets initiative]. One of the areas that will probably be part of that is business travel. 

BTN: Is it something that other companies can learn from and decide to make changes?

Matthias: Exactly. The next step for Google is to make this available to all companies, and that’s something that they’re working on. At the moment, the travel impact model is available to anyone free of charge to use as a means of estimating future emissions on flights, but they haven’t turned a switch to make the past emissions feature available yet. 

The project with Sabre was really a case study to test the travel impact model’s effectiveness, and now verify that it works. The next step for them is to make that available as well. And I think that will be crucial as regulations for reporting get tighter and tighter. We’ve got things like the [European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] coming in next year, so I think it’s great timing for companies that are looking to more accurately measure their emissions to have this model available to them to use.

BTN: Will Sabre make changes to its products based on these findings? 

Matthias: The main thing for us to consider now on the product side is how we integrate the travel impact model as a reporting asset for our customers. Again, that’s a next step for our product teams and the sustainability teams to have that conversation. I know that through our partnership with Google, we are already looking at how we build on what we’ve already put available in our tools. We’ve already got the travel impact model calculating future emissions in our agency [Sabre Red 360] and corporation tool [GetThere]. 

BTN: Are the emissions estimates automatically included in Red 360 and GetThere, or do companies have to ask for it to be included?

Matthias: With Sabre Red 360, it’s standard. With GetThere, it’s currently opt-in, but I am having conversations with the product team to get that feature of opt-in taken out next year so that it appears automatically.

BTN: What trends have you noticed in the past year since adding the Google model to those tools on whether agents or corporate travelers are using the data to make more sustainable choices?

Matthias: For us that’s the next step, and Travalyst as well is measuring the impact of the travel impact model. … The next stage is to work with the coalition partners to establish how we can measure whether that’s having an impact on booking decisions. It’s not something that we currently have, but it’s something that we all really want and need to demonstrate the effectiveness of the TIM going forward.

BTN: What are the next sustainability steps for Sabre?

Matthias: There’s a bit of a roadmap of what we can do to enhance that, by adding things like contextualization, filtering and then eventually reporting. That would be quite a big technology update for us to be able to add to a reporting function using the travel impact model into our technology. [Also, determining] what [client] carbon emissions were for booked flights [as opposed to estimates at the time of booking]. … We’re planning to move forward with all the work that we’re doing alongside the Travalyst coalition, which includes various product integrations and work around building the TIM into our products. 

BTN: Is there anything you would like to see added to the Google model to make it even more accurate?

Matthias: I would like to see contrails added in, and that’s something that Google is working on. That’s a non-CO2 emission, and tak[es] that into account as well of the overall sustainability performance of a flight. That would add another element to the calculation.