Making Travel More Sustainable: Reed & Mackay

Reed & Mackay has been working with Carbonology, specialists in carbon standards, to achieve verification to the highest level.

“If travel is a necessity, then make it as ‘green’ as possible,” this is the ethos of Reed & Mackay, a global service leader in corporate travel and event management.

The company is using its position of influence in the supply chain to support its clients make good travel decisions and to help them quantify, manage, and reduce their CO2 footprints.

Although Reed & Mackay has been certified to the environmental standard ISO 14001 for over ten years, the business wanted to further underpin the trust of their clients through enhanced transparency over its own carbon reduction. It concluded that an independent audit of its reporting would provide internal and external audiences with high levels of confidence.

So, Reed & Mackay has been working with Carbonology, specialists in carbon standards, to achieve verification to the highest level. Known as a ‘reasonable level of assurance,’ the assessors use significant evidence to provide a positive opinion that the company’s GHG inventory is correct.

In this interview, Chris Truss Global Sustainability Director at Reed & Mackay, explains the benefits of verification and the value it offers, he says;

“It is essential in today’s world to be able to advise on sustainable travel, so we need to operate sustainably ourselves and articulate this effectively to our clients.”

How does verification create a market differentiator?

The beauty of sustainability reporting is that you are able to communicate to clients, and the wider marketplace, all the work that is going on across the business from one place.

As a business, we have confidence that we are doing a good job – we have signed up to the United Nations global compact, are operating in alignment with the UN’s sustainable development goals, have become an EcoVadis rated supplier, and have undertaken our first CDP disclosure – but we also wanted to have our performance verified objectively.

There are two levels of verification, 'limited assurance' which concludes that there are no significant issues. But for those, like ourselves, looking to provide the highest level of confidence to their stakeholders, the best option is 'reasonable assurance'.

So, to provide an expert viewpoint we appointed Carbonology, specialists in carbon standards, to assess our methods and ‘mark our homework’.

There was also a growing urgency, legislation like CSRD is making reporting mandatory and as an early adopter we wanted to be ahead of the curve. Also, with the voluntary disclosure programmes, such as CDP and EcoVadis, you need to have external verification to attain the highest ranking and we were keen to achieve those accolades.  

What type of insights did it give you?

The process of verification helped Reed & Mackay to dig deeper, crucially, it gave full visibility about where our carbon emissions were coming from and the opportunities to mitigate them.

So, we now have a very focussed and accurate reduction plan based on real and verified numbers. This has given us validation of our processes and confidence in what we have been doing, this has made a huge difference internally.

Externally, we are now more authoritative when talking to clients about our processes. Having the highest level of assurance, shows we really understand what we are talking about, and this then leads to having more meaningful conversation.

From a position of knowledge, it becomes possible to start affecting behaviours and to change things for the better.

Is sustainable travel possible?

We do recognise that the corporate travel industry has a high carbon footprint, but uniquely we are in a position of influence to help reduce those impacts.

From the outset the question should be: ‘do I need to make this journey?’ If the answer is yes, then the challenge is how to make it more efficient and sustainable at every stage in the process.

Cost is obviously still a huge consideration when people are travelling, but our intention is to make sure that people have visibility of carbon footprint alongside cost so they can make a fair and balanced decision with both of those factors at play.

For example, we provide visibility of the carbon footprint of every single booking, at every stage of the journey. So, if the traveller doesn’t take the lowest carbon option for a particular journey, the system could be set up to require additional approvals from within the organisation to justify that choice.

Also to simplify reporting, we can provide an analysis of all business travel activity at a very granular level and indicate where savings have been missed. Perhaps employees have taken a flight where a rail journey exists, or where multiple people from the same firm are travelling to the same location when perhaps they could have sent fewer people, for example.

How can clients mitigate the impact of travel?

Once the travel has been undertaken, we offer our clients additional services; this could be the ability to set carbon budgets across their businesses, or to purchase sustainable aviation fuel direct from the fuel providers.

This provides the opportunity to both mitigate the carbon that's been emitted and to build plans around how to decarbonise or reduce carbon footprints into the future.

Are there benefits on many levels?

Verification by Carbonology has definitely helped give our staff visibility of the impacts they have, as individuals, on our carbon footprint. That learning has been massive and has made a real difference to our business.

Achieving reasonable assurance, and the insights it has given, has also created a good launchpad for our net zero strategy and that is good for our customers, stakeholders, and the planet.