Barely a week seems to have passed in 2021 without another corporate client or travel management company signing a sustainable aviation fuel deal. All follow a path tread by Microsoft in October 2019 when it became the first global business to commit to purchasing SAF, in this case from KLM and joint-venture partner Delta on U.S.-Netherlands flights.
By April 2021 another 15 companies had joined the KLM program, and Microsoft had entered a similar agreement with Alaska Airlines. Carriers including United, JetBlue and British Airways have gone on to launch SAF initiatives since.
Microsoft’s work on SAF was a collaboration between its sustainability and travel teams, a key member of the latter being U.K.-based Julia Fidler. She also played a major role in setting up the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, which launched in April 2021 to harmonize SAF buying processes and provided education on a highly technical topic.
SAF also is a contentious topic. At Business Travel Show Europe in September, travel managers voted heavily in favor of a peer’s assertion that “there’s no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel.”
“There’s some truth in that,” said Fidler, who is aware of the associated pitfalls, ranging from the small volumes in production to the dubious provenance of some crops harvested for SAF to the radiative effects of any fuel emissions at altitude. However, she added, “if you believe some travel should continue, then we should be looking at alternatives to fossil fuel. The more I learn about taking fossil fuels out of the ground, the more I see the benefit.”
Fidler helped to counter another objection by taking Microsoft into a pilot program announced in November to ensure no two buyers can claim the same SAF as a carbon-reduction. And she makes it clear that buying SAF can be only one element of a much wider strategy by companies to curb travel emissions, of which the most important part always will be reducing trip volumes. Microsoft has run an internal campaign called Skip a Trip.
At the beginning of 2021, Fidler exited her lifelong career in travel to assume a sustainable procurement role within Microsoft. Fidler urged all travel managers to start acting green. “I still sense a lot of defensive responses around sustainability in the travel industry,” she said. “It’s such an amazing opportunity to learn and grow and feel you are really contributing to something worthwhile.”