The requirement to manage corporate travel
through a green lens has become all but ubiquitous. Yet buyers continue to struggle
with the very first challenge of a sustainable travel strategy: sourcing
granular data about emissions caused by their company’s business journeys.
Self-styled “carbon intelligence platform” Thrust
Carbon has proved one of the most successful aspirants to fill this chasm in
the market. Co-founded only in 2019 by Brits Mark Corbett and Kit Brennan, “2022
is the year we launched our biggest partnerships, converted clients and then
really started driving emissions changes through that,” said Corbett.
Thrust Carbon claims already to be used by most
of the world’s 10 largest travel management companies. New signings in 2022
included CWT, FCM and Travel Leaders Corporate. Partnerships confirmed in other
parts of the managed travel ecosystem include SAP Concur, Deem, Travelogix,
Conferma Pay and Traxo. Named direct corporate clients include S&P Global,
Novartis, Toyota and FLSmidth & Co.
Factors that make up Thrust Carbon’s emissions
calculations include not only route but also class of travel, aircraft type,
cabin configuration, layout and load factors, passenger/freight split, and
radiative forcing, which is the multiplier effect of emitting gases at altitude.
Perhaps most crucially for influencing greener booking choices, Thrust Carbon’s
application programming interfaces can pipe in emissions data at the point of
search on its partners’ reservation tools.
Corbett graduated with a bachelor’s degree in
philosophy from King’s College London in 2010, having already created his first
social enterprise aged 18. He has added a lengthy array of entrepreneurial and
tech industry entries to his CV ever since. Thrust Carbon built its prototype
during an International Air Transport Association hackathon in 2019, which it
won, and it also won a BTN Innovate Faceoff Innovator of the Year award in
2020.
Though pleased with Thrust Carbon’s progress,
“the caveat is that we are still scratching the surface,” said Corbett. “We
have rolled out carbon budgets with our clients but fully integrating that into
travel management company and online booking tools still takes a huge amount of
effort from their side. Everyone reading this will know the challenges across
the wider tech and travel eco-system.”
Not short of self-confidence, Corbett added
that “next year we are going to announce something absolutely ground-breaking,”
relating to that part of the trip process between point of sale and the trip
itself, “which we think could be the biggest news since the invention of the passenger
name record.”