Top 10 Challenges Face Green Meetings
Attendees at the first ever Green Travel Summit collaborate to define the leading challenges facing Corporate America’s efforts to reduce their carbon footprint related to business travel and corporate meetings
Following were the top issues attendees identified in implementing carbon reducing programs:
1) Where to begin – The single greatest challenge for many executives is defining a road map of the process to BEGIN greening business travel and meetings.
2) Perception vs. reality regarding costs – Understanding the costs associated with “greening” is often at odds with the internal perception of the process.
3) Overcoming resistance to change – In many organizations corporate travel expectations are at odds with the change required to reduce the associated carbon footprint.
4) Buy in from senior management – The need to have top management support of related green initiatives.
5) ROI – A better understanding of the actual ROI of greening initiates and tracking tools to report ROI.
6) Securing budget – In a difficult economy identifying and allocating funding for green initiatives is increasingly difficult.
7) Reporting standards and metrics – As green travel programs are instituted, procedures, technologies and standards to report progress are not clearly defined.
8) Green washing: Truth vs. fiction – Cutting through the hype to achieve environmentally sustainable practices is increasingly more critical.
9) Buy in from both the planner and the supplier –Establishing acceptable standards and implementing across the corporate travel industry supply chain is needed.
10) Communicating and educating all relative stakeholders – Once green corporate travel policies begin to be implemented, communicating the program and the desired results to relative stakeholders is critical to success.
The Green Travel Summit was held at the Fairmont, Newport Beach, California, March 23-24, 2009 and assembled executives from a cross-section of the travel industry including: corporate travel buyers, managers, meeting and incentive planners as well as travel marketing executives, corporate travel suppliers and destination marketing organizations.
The event is supported by Media Sponsors Business Travel News, Successful Meetings, Meeting News and TravelMole. SkyTeam is the Official Airline Alliance and EcoSecurities Official Carbon Offset Provider.
Valere Tjolle
Valere
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