Amex GBT integrates with CHOOOSE to enhance business air travel emissions data

Leading B2B travel platform American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) has reached an agreement with CHOOOSE to integrate the climate tech company’s carbon emissions calculations across Amex GBT’s travel booking and reporting tools. With the integration, business travellers will see consistent trip emissions values in their search results, itineraries and in the Amex GBT Mobile app for past and future trips. Currently, Amex GBT displays carbon emission data in its online booking tool Neo to help travellers make “educated, sustainable” decisions and the new move will replace current calculation mechanisms with seamlessly integrated emissions calculations from CHOOOSE. Travel managers will be able to apply CHOOOSE-powered calculations to trips booked since 2019 for tracking, analysing and managing carbon footprints. Amex GBT said the integration is an important step in building the architecture for additional carbon compensation solutions across its products and services portfolio.

“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,” commented Mark McSpadden, Amex GBT’s VP of product strategy and user experience. “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 data across our suite of booking, tracking and reporting tools. This helps educate travellers and drive real progress in sustainable travel.”

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. This, said Amex GBT, will provide more visibility into the traveller’s individual carbon footprint, “helping them better understand the environmental impact of travel and influence their booking behaviour.”

The integration will also allow Amex GBT to access industry-accepted air travel emissions methodologies, for example those of ICAO, UK BEIS, US EPA and France ADEME. Amex GBT also integrates with additional data sources such as IATA CO2 Connect, an emissions calculator developed with real airline data and based on IATA’s Recommended Practice RP 1726.

The company said this will give clients the flexibility to include more criteria such as distance, fuel burn, occupancy, cabin class and belly cargo to provide a higher degree of accuracy. Where applicable by methodology, customers can also select their preferences on radiative forcing (to account for non-CO2 climate impacts) and well-to-wake emissions, which is critical  for measuring the benefits of sustainable aviation fuel. Emissions data for additional travel segments such as rail, car and hotel will follow, said Amex GBT, with additional methodologies and features available over time.

Added the company: “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 decarbonisation solutions.”

CHOOOSE data will also support sustainable meeting and events solutions, “providing a consistent client experience with reliable data across Amex GBT’s services.” Amex GBT’s global B2B travel tech platform Egencia will integrate certain CHOOOSE-powered emissions calculations, including its reporting tool.

“We are very happy to support Amex GBT, and the millions of travellers they serve, in creating an industry-leading set of tools to track, understand and address the carbon footprint associated with business travel,” said Andreas Sletvoll, CEO and founder of Oslo-headquartered CHOOSE. “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.”

The CHOOOSE platform has been selected by a number of airlines including Southwest, Avianca, Japan Airlines, LATAM, Air Canada, Finnair, Iberia, Norwegian and British Airways.

Christopher Surgenor

Editor

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