Seeking Harmony in Sustainable Procurement
Inside the GBTA Foundation's new standards for sourcing sustainable suppliers
The developing discipline of sustainable travel procurement has reached new levels of prominence and maturity. It's no longer the exclusive province of large or multinational companies: about 72 percent of all travel buyer respondents to BTN's sustainability survey earlier this year said their organizations ask at least some sustainability-related questions in their travel sourcing efforts.
But as sustainable travel procurement matures from a travel management exception to a rule, so too has the complexity of the process. The collection, measurement and analysis of carbon emissions—not to mention other forms of greenhouse gases—remains something of an inexact science, with multiple public and private methodologies available to determine the effect on the atmosphere of suppliers' operations.
Additionally, most every major travel supplier has a corporate team dedicated to environmental, social and governance-related topics, as do many corporate buyers' organizations. Buyer ESG teams often seek a level of sustainability-related detail that requires the involvement of suppliers' ESG counterparts to offer thorough responses, but the detail sought may well differ from the sustainability questions asked by the next would-be account, and the next, and the next.
It all adds up to a process that, while genuinely important and valuable to many buyers and suppliers alike, nevertheless can be a bit slippery and a bit protracted.
It's a state of affairs the Global Business Travel Association Foundation earlier this year began to try to address with the release of its first set of sustainable procurement standards. The first release focuses on sustainable air procurement and includes a bank of 31 questions designed for buyers to choose from to include in requests for proposals. Airlines then could have detailed responses at the ready, making for quicker responses and, theoretically, more time for discussion and negotiation, according to the foundation.
The standards include a companion guide to sustainable air procurement, which offers detail on some of the concepts behind the questions, offering buyers additional detail in their efforts to assess which topics to include in their RFPs.
Future releases will include standards developed for sustainable accommodation and car rental procurement, according to the foundation, each currently slated for later this year.
Breaking
GBTA Releases Sustainable Lodging Standards
The Global Business Travel Association Foundation this week released a set of what it calls standards for sustainable lodging procurement. It's the group's second set of such standards; the foundation released standards for sustainable aviation procurement in March.
The standards include a bank of 50 questions designed for buyers to consider including in their lodging requests for proposals, giving hoteliers the opportunity to answer a standardized set of sustainability questions. Not all the questions in the standards are designed to be in a company's RFP, rather, the intent is for buyers to consider which questions are best suited to their own organizations' sustainability goals.
The lodging standards include questions on hotel environmental, social and governance policies, plans, and targets, as well as the hotel's certificates and sustainability accreditations. It also includes questions on individual property carbon emissions, as measured in CO2 equivalent emissions per room per night.
The standards include questions on other environmental factors, including the hotel's energy consumption, water use, waste management approach, food and beverage—including the availability of plant-based meals—as well as the availability of electric vehicle charging stations, as well as the biodiversity of its amenities and operations.
Beyond sustainability, the standards also include questions on the hotel's approach to human rights, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and its investments in its community.
In contrast with the questions in the aviation standards, many of which were open-ended, the vast majority of the hotel questions—43 of the 50—can be answered by the hotel with a "yes" or "no" answer. Four require a number to answer, including emissions and water use information, with only three open-ended, including requests to detail the hotels ESG objectives and sustainability accreditation held.
The standards, where applicable, also show alignment with other industry RFP and sustainability tools, including those provided by Cvent and HRS, the World Travel and Tourism Council, Travalyst and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.
"With more and more travel programs incorporating sustainability goals into their supplier relationships, and with hotel procurement becoming more complex every year, it is imperative that buyers have a straightforward way to analyze the sustainability performance of their hotel suppliers," the GBTA Foundation said in a procurement guide that accompanies the standards. The foundation suggested that "travel management companies and others who are supporting buyers in this effort should also align their scorecards and procurement guidance with the Sustainable Procurement Standards."
The standards are available on the GBTA Foundation website. One need not be a GBTA member to download them.
Working in Harmony
GBTA Foundation and representatives of GBTA's Sustainability Committee on a recent webinar detailed their efforts to develop the airline standards and the goals they hope to achieve.
The genesis of the effort to create the sustainable procurement standards was from a rather innocuous source, a 2021 post in GBTA's member-only online hub from a member who was looking for an example of a scorecard that could be used to compare suppliers' sustainability efforts, said GBTA Foundation senior manager of sustainability Kelsey Frenkiel during the webinar.
“Buyers felt they were getting this directive from
their ESG teams to include sustainability questions in their procurement process, but perhaps they didn't know what questions to ask or how to use that data."
"This ignited a whole conversation around this and a lot of interest, and among the GBTA Sustainability Committee and the GBTA Foundation, a conversation around a resource that would be most helpful to the industry," Frenkiel said.
Officials found during conversations with buyers and suppliers that a lack of standardization on sustainability topics posed a challenge to effective procurement, she said.
"On one side of the coin, buyers felt that they were getting this directive from their ESG teams to include sustainability questions in their procurement process, but perhaps they didn't know what questions to ask or how to use that data," Frenkiel said. "On the other side of the procurement coin, suppliers felt that they were getting inundated with sometimes unique questionnaires, with new questions that might not always be material to their operations, and they weren't always sure how that data was going to be used."
The group canvassed technology providers who already had developed some guidelines for sustainable air procurement, Frenkiel said, along with several airlines as well as buyers who already were using sustainability-related questions in their air RFPs. Benchmarking the latter is easier said than done, said Jenny Sabineu, Salesforce senior manager for travel and EMEA and Latin America and sustainability and a member of GBTA's Sustainability Committee, who on the webinar detailed how her work with Salesforce's corporate sustainability standards helped inform the development of the standards.
"Our goal was … to create questions that were as standardized as possible [and] that enabled our sales team themselves to actually answer these questions."
"When I first started managing sustainability for our program, one of the first things you do is lay out your short, medium and long-term goals," Sabineu said on the webinar. "I looked at the short term as adding sustainability questions into supplier procurement process and RFPs. … At the time I thought this was going to be low-hanging fruit, something easy to get myself started, and I quickly learned that it was very difficult."
From the supplier side, Adam Keeter, United Airlines' United for Business director of b-to-b products and partners and a member of GBTA's Sustainability Committee, said on the webinar that carriers could develop responses to the standards, speeding up a process that can get bogged down by unique questions for which sales reps don't necessarily have answers handy. Questions that reflect "real metrics and topics that are most relevant" could help, he said.
"It's been a fairly significant challenge continuously bringing in our ESG team to each RFP and spending a large amount of time on different types of questions that were either worded differently or that asked for different metrics," Keeter said. "Our goal in this really was to mitigate all that to create questions that were as standardized as possible … that enabled our sales team themselves to actually answer these questions."
Frenkiel said airlines that represented about one-third of global capacity, as represented in revenue passenger kilometers, contributed feedback to the development of the standards.
Questions & Answers
The 31 questions cover a wide cross-section of an airline's operations, accreditations, investment and philosophies. They include questions on carbon-emissions calculations, plans and targets and approach toward sustainable aviation fuel. They also include questions about the airline's stances on human rights, community support, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
"Something that everyone involved was very in tune with was that we weren't trying to add questions if they were not pertinent," said GBTA Sustainability Committee chair Robyn Grassanovits, also VP of emerging business for aviation analytics firm Cirium, during the webinar. "We looked for every opportunity to make sure that, is this informative, is this actionable, and all the suppliers can answer this."
Among the questions included:
- Has your company set science-based emissions reduction targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative? If not, what validation method are you utilizing?
- Does your company have any industry certifications specific to your performance or progress in environmental sustainability?
- What company-wide or industry initiatives is your airline involved in to reduce or calculate the impacts of radiative forcing and/or non-CO2 effects? Please describe.
- Can your company provide full lifecycle (well-to-wake) reporting today? Why or why not?
- Are you using Sustainable Aviation Fuel today?
- Do you have any publicly-disclosed fleet renewal plans? If yes, please describe.
The point, Frenkiel said, is not necessarily to include each of the 31 questions in an RFP, but to work with internal departments including ESG to determine which questions are the best fits for the organization. The intricacy of that process shouldn't be underestimated, Sabineu said.
"There's a lot of work and collaboration that needs to happen internally at your organization depending on where you're starting in your journey," Sabineu said. She cited the possible departments within the buyer organization beyond ESG that could play a role in the air sourcing process—finance, sourcing, procurement, legal—and noted that reaching a consensus on the questions to include will take some time.
"I have some time because we won't be doing another airline RFP at least for a few years," she said, "but certainly don't underestimate the amount of time that it will take to do that internal collaboration and make sure that you go into the process knowing … what questions are material to make a difference."
One move the webinar panel discouraged, however, was altering or editing the sustainability questions before they are included in an airline RFP. Doing so, they said, not only could limit the questions' utility for benchmarking but also could gum up the sourcing process. They noted that the foundation is using the word "standards," and not "guidelines" for that reason.
"You could ask a question and … one supplier would interpret it one way and another supplier would interpret it another way, and that is very dangerous especially as a buyer when you're trying to understand and benchmark responses," Grassanovits said. "We strongly encourage you to not change these questions because they have been heavily vetted across numerous suppliers so that they understand exactly the intent behind the question."
Additionally, she said, an airline sales rep who sees an unfamiliar question in an RFP may not have the answer at hand, and the search for details could extend an already-lengthy sourcing process.
A Free-Text Focus?
One potential complication for buyers interested in scorecard-based assessment are the share of questions that require open-ended text responses to answer. Of the 31 questions, six can be answered with a yes or a no, and another four require a figure to answer. But the remainder can be answered only with open-ended text, which could make it more challenging to compare carriers in a scorecard environment
"We went back and forth on it quite a bit," Grassanovits said. "We started it with a yes/no [structure] so that you could do a quick comparison and benchmark of who answered 'yes' and who answered 'no,' and what we found is there was a lot of 'sort ofs.' … What we quickly found is that we had to be, at least in the aviation sector, a lot more flexible and ingest some qualitative … information."
Sabineu suggested scorecard-minded buyers could use the quantitative questions in RFPs, while bringing up qualitative questions in conversations with the carrier.
Among the quantitative questions are requests for the carrier's emissions per revenue passenger kilometer and revenue ton kilometer based on mainline operations for a given year, as well as the average age of the carrier's fleet.
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