BTN Group’s 2023 Sustainable Travel Program Finalist
CASE STUDY: SIEMENS
Siemens believes carbon emissions can be reduced not only by traveling less but also by traveling smarter. Its travel sustainability strategy stands out especially for the focus it places on supply-side innovation.
Most notably, the Germany-headquartered conglomerate is the first corporate adopter of the Green Stay Initiative created by hotel portal HRS, allowing travelers to identify more sustainable accommodation options at the point of booking. Siemens has also begun a pilot with Air France-KLM to use only sustainable aviation fuel on two routes where it is a major customer.
“We say to travelers, before you start planning your trip, ask ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ ” said head of global airline procurement and payment solutions Susanne Steinmann. “This is of course the first step you have to take. The next step is to ask yourself how you travel and which suppliers you use. The clear advice from us to our travelers is, we have the right suppliers in the portfolio and in our booking tool, so you have the ability to choose the most sustainable way to travel.”
Discriminating between suppliers based on environmental performance can make a meaningful difference, said Steinmann’s colleague, head of global lodging procurement Eric Hofmeister. According to the methodology used by Siemens, the per-night equivalent carbon emissions for a hotel stay, depending on the choice of property, varies from six to 130 kilograms, a range that startled Hofmeister when he looked into the numbers. “You truly have a chance to travel smart,” he said. “You cannot always avoid emissions by not traveling, but you can instead travel making the right choices.”
Siemens’ supply-side sustainable travel initiative is just one part of a strategy that works toward the company’s overall sustainability goals. Siemens has committed to achieving net zero operations by 2030, following a plan approved through the Science Based Targets initiative. As of December 2022, the company had reduced Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 46 percent compared with 2019 and aims to achieve 90 percent reduction by 2030. Siemens also has targeted Scope 3 emissions with a goal to reduce by 20 percent by 2030, compared to 2020. Business travel is part of the Scope 3 target, and while no specific goals have been set for travel emissions, Siemens’ many supply-chain efforts roll up to that Scope 3 initiative.
GSI’s Next Step
Siemens has 200,000 travelers globally and is pursuing accommodation-related emissions reduction by requiring all hotels in its program to join the HRS GSI project. HRS assesses properties on environmental criteria and awards those which qualify with a green leaf logo on its booking tool.
To date, 50,000 hotels have elected to participate in GSI, with more coming on board. In the Siemens preferred hotel program for 2023, 72 percent participate in Green Stay.
A critical breakthrough made by GSI, according to Hofmeister, is that it steers travelers toward making greener choices at the point of booking. “It’s very important we have transparency about the emissions we are making because only then can you make a conscious decision about, ‘Do I really have to travel?’ ” he said. “If you have the comparison between different suppliers, if there is a hotel which is 50kg per night instead of 6kg, you can also make a very conscious decision.”
Hofmeister hopes to make choices even clearer. At present, all hotels are recognized in the same way: either they are considered sufficiently sustainable to earn the green leaf symbol, or they have no green leaf at all.
Within the next couple of months, Hofmeister intends that each property will instead display a score. Hovering over the score with a mouse would reveal details including the hotel’s performance on such criteria as carbon emissions, water and waste. “The score very much depends on the destination,” said Hofmeister. “In some, for example, water is more critical than other criteria.”
Siemens has played an integral part in refining the GSI process, especially the questionnaire that hotels have to complete, leading to a simplified version for smaller suppliers.
“HRS started with a version where you immediately had to answer 80 questions, but [we realized] that independent hotels do not have the resources to cover this topic, and that’s why we introduced this staged approach,” Hofmeister said. “The threshold is not so high. That was my mission last year: come on board with this journey. I don’t want to harm you because in the early stage you took the initiative.”
For the forthcoming transition to scoring, hotels have to input supporting data. “It’s up to us at Siemens to put a weighting on it to come up with the score,” said Hofmeister. “HRS makes the methodology behind it, and we give the weighting. HRS is not the rule keeper. It’s us.”
Despite the work that has gone into the initiative, Siemens travelers are not obliged to book GSI-designated hotels. “I see myself as responsible for driving behavior in a different direction by making transparent which hotels are sustainable,” Hofmeister said.
Seeking Air Solutions
Achieving transparency for air bookings is proving much harder as Siemens strives along with the rest of the travel purchasing community to obtain reliable, granular emissions data. “Online booking engines always display averages, so it’s not really an accurate comparison,” said Steinmann. “This is one where we are struggling, to be honest. You can only work with plug-ins at the moment.”
Progress has been made with certain airlines to report to Siemens using Siemens’ preferred standard for measuring GHG emissions. It is one of several examples, along with the GSI project, of the Siemens travel team’s policy of collaborating at a deep level with suppliers and service providers over its sustainability goals.
Another example is the agreement with Air France-KLM that the two carriers will use only SAF on its routes from Nuremberg to Amsterdam and Paris. “In the air sector we are trying to buy SAF from airlines to lower our emissions,” said Steinmann. “We are hoping to add more routes and we are working with Air France-KLM to find a very smart solution to add the cost to the ticket price, not pay up front. We’re hoping to get other airlines into it too.”
More Collaboration Needed to Reach Goals
Another supplier category in which Siemens wants to see faster progress is car rental. The company is pushing vendors to offer more electric cars but is frustrated by delays in vehicle deliveries to the rental market.
Meanwhile, Hofmeister wants to broaden the scope of GSI beyond purely environmental targets. “Right now it is called Green Stay. It is not called Sustainable Stay,” he said. “We do not have all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals included, but that’s the target: to look at all dimensions of sustainability.”
Non-environmental aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals include eliminating hunger, improving health standards and gender equality. Hofmeister recommends the goals as the starting point for travel managers aiming to build a sustainability strategy. “Take a look at how your company is implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the GHG Protocol and start taking action in your area of responsibility,” he said.
In Steinmann’s view, “You simply have to start. The perfect solution is not there for the time being. You may take the wrong approach, as we did two or three years ago when we thought offsetting was the solution for reaching targets, but then SAF came out, and this is our new solution to start reducing emissions. It’s learning by doing things, maybe taking the wrong path but then appreciating that’s also a learning in the end.”
There is no perfect solution to combating the climate emergency, but the Siemens travel team believe every attempt to reduce emissions helps. Asked whether the hotel initiative is worthwhile, given that, according to Advito, hotel emissions represent only 3 to 4 percent of total business travel emissions, Hofmeister said: “You could then also challenge whether it really makes sense when you compare with our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, but I think that’s the wrong approach. We have significant travel volume, and we do have a significant carbon footprint produced by lodgings.
“At Siemens it is always our mission to drive innovation and sustainability, so we need to take action and do something,” Hofmeister said.
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