Flattering to deceive

Travel buyers are exposed when managing and reporting on sustainability. Their company’s greenhouse gas emissions caused by business travel fall under scope 3, or indirect. That means buyers must rely on the direct polluters, principally airlines, to be transparent about the size of their emissions and true potential to reduce them.

Unfortunately, a series of legal judgments and regulatory interventions in recent months have established airlines sometimes mislead on these issues. Collectively, this practice is known as greenwashing: falsely portraying products, services or companies as sustainable or environmentally friendly.

Anti-greenwashing measures therefore make buyers’ work easier, believes Johnny White, a lawyer with ClientEarth, a 300-strong non-governmental organisation which uses the law to protect the environment. “This should help travel managers tell what is real when it comes to sustainability, and what is not,” White says. “That’s the whole purpose of this area of law: to protect decision-useful information.”

“Aviation is very highly carbon-intensive. It relies on fossil fuels and so the only way to reduce the impact of aviation is to reduce use of aviation”

Flying cannot become sustainable – official

Perhaps the most important development for travel managers is a March 2024 judgment by Amsterdam’s District Court on a case brought against KLM by Dutch climate activists Fossielvrij Netherlands and Reclame Fossielvrij and supported by ClientEarth. The court stated that advertisements “which suggest that flying can be or become sustainable… are misleading and unlawful.”

This judgment, in White’s view, tells travel managers where they must now focus their sustainability efforts. “It ultimately points to the truth, which is that aviation is very highly carbon-intensive,” he says. “It relies on fossil fuels and so the only way to reduce the impact of aviation is to reduce use of aviation.”

Ami Taylor, associate consultant with corporate travel consultancy Festive Road, believes the same finding makes the Amsterdam judgment equally momentous for the entire business travel sector.

“One component of the KLM judgment talked about the airline’s commercial structure,” Taylor says. “The airline had talked in its business plan about the need for growth, which was at odds with its environmental claims. If organisations are remunerated by increasing emissions, how does their core business align or conflict with the marketing messaging they are putting out around sustainability? I am seeing some travel management companies and online booking tools shift towards a subscription basis to allow them to decouple transactional growth from financial growth.”

“The win rate for litigating over greenwashing is higher than in other areas of law”

The EU and UK crackdown begins

The Amsterdam judgment was followed in April by the European Commission announcing it had written to 20 airlines after “identifying several types of potentially misleading green claims”. The move was in response to a complaint from BEUC, the European representative body for national consumer groups. Areas of concern included:
• Use of the term “sustainable aviation fuel”;
• Use of terms such as “green”, “sustainable” or “responsible” in an absolute way;
• Claiming a movement to net zero emissions without clear, verifiable commitments, targets and independent monitoring;
• Presenting consumers with an unsubstantiated CO2 calcuator for specific flights;
• Presenting consumers with unsubstantiated emissions comparisons for different flights.

In the UK, meanwhile, the Competition and Markets Authority and Advertising Standards Authority “have both expressed interest in tackling the greenwashing of goods and services by businesses,” says Association of British Travel Agents solicitor Meera Tharmarajah. “We know they are aligned in their expectations of companies when communicating about environmental credentials, and we have seen the ASA investigate and rule against a number of travel companies’ advertising.”

In Iine with a Green Claims Code imposed by the CMA, the ASA censured ads by Air France, Etihad and Lufthansa in December 2023, and by Virgin Atlantic in August 2024.

White is confident the Amsterdam judgment will lead to more legal action against airlines throughout Europe if they mislead again. “It’s not a binding precedent on all other European courts but it is a persuasive precedent because the law that the case was about is European consumer protection law,” he says. “It is the same law as in Germany, Poland and also the UK, which hasn’t changed since Brexit.”

Taylor agrees that “we will continue to see a hardening of legislation around climate law.” This includes the EU’s Green Claims Directive, currently in its final stages of legislative approval. The directive provides for fines of up to 4 per cent of annual turnover for corporate transgressors. Taylor notes that “the win rate for litigating over greenwashing is higher than in other areas of law”, and that NGOs are increasingly litigating alongside regulators and other government bodies.

Opinion is divided over whether airlines greenwash deliberately. White believes some carriers have an agenda to reduce opposition to commercial expansion by convincing the public that emissions can be lowered.

But Julien Etchanchu, senior director for sustainability with BCD Travel's consulting wing Advito is “not sure. I don’t think airlines are bad guys doing greenwashing. I think they believe in their initiatives. I see a lack of education in the industry.”

The faff over SAF

Spare a thought for airlines as well over the mixed messages they are receiving from authorities about alternative aviation fuels, which carriers commonly and – the Amsterdam judgment has now established – misleadingly market as sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.

Virgin’s UK radio ad was banned for claiming a flight in November 2023 was the first transatlantic crossing by a commercial airliner on “100 per cent sustainable aviation fuel.” The ASA ruled that “listeners who interpreted the claim… to mean that the fuel was 100 per cent sustainable were likely to expect that it had no negative environmental impacts at all.”

Yet the then UK’s Conservative government had used the same terminology to praise the initiative. Subsequently, the Labour government elected in 2024 pledged in its first King’s Speech to expand development of “sustainable aviation fuel.”

Likewise, while the Amsterdam judgment considered the phrase misleading under EU law, the EU’s own ReFuelEU Aviation initiative “promotes the increased use of sustainable aviation fuels as the single most important powerful tool to decrease aviation CO2 emissions.”

Notwithstanding the policy incoherence over SAF, ClientEarth is warning airlines to cease and desist. In a letter to 71 airlines on what it sees as the “red lines” established by the Amsterdam judgment, the NGO states that “airlines should not describe alternative fuels with the misleading label ‘sustainable aviation fuel’ … SAF should no longer be used in consumer-oriented communication … and should not paint too rosy a picture of the limited contribution that alternative fuels can make.”

Etchanchu agrees that airlines cannot, and should not, “call alternative fuels ‘sustainable’” any longer, a view endorsed by Nadia Crowe, environmental sustainability senior analyst for the industrial software company Aveva. “People see the word ‘sustainable’ and think ‘Fine, I can travel as much as I want as long as I use sustainable aviation fuel’ when in reality there are still emissions being produced on top of all those already in our atmosphere. Potentially it’s leading to behaviours we don’t want and that’s dangerous,” says Crowe.

Offset – the original greenwashing sin

Offsetting – essentially trying to remove carbon from the atmosphere to neutralise adding carbon to it elsewhere – is ruled largely inadmissible not only by the European Commission warning letter from April but also the Amsterdam judgement. It’s a move which pleases Etchanchu. “At some point you have to follow what science says, which is that you cannot be carbon-neutral,” he says.

But that might change. Following intense lobbying, Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the organisation which validates corporate strategies to reduce global warming, has provisionally decided to reinstate offsetting as a Scope 3 reduction method. SBTi employees have threatened resignation.

“If they go in this new direction it will be possible for a company to decrease emissions much less, or maybe not decrease at all, through offsets and then appear as sustainable,” says Etchanchu. “Today the line is pretty clear but I fear it is about to become unclear again.”

How travel managers can avoid greenwashing

To date airlines have been chastised for greenwashing through consumer protection law that would not apply to misleading statements in business documentation. However, there are rules protecting investors that could cover misleading statements about sustainability. Additionally, there are penalties for misreporting of emissions under the new EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

“Certainly the statements that companies make about sustainability are under scrutiny, not just from NGOs, but also the market and regulators, and I would say as well from law firms that represent investors who lose money,” says White, who adds reputational risk must also be taken into account.

Among those risks are impaired talent recruitment and retention “because people want to work for employers doing the right thing on climate,” White says. For similar reasons, says Etchanchu, travel managers need to “be careful what you say to travellers because more and more they are informed. Travel managers are not always the ones who know the most about sustainability within their company.”

It therefore follows that travel managers now need to educate themselves deeply on sustainability, and work closely with dedicated sustainability colleagues. Taylor urges seeking clearance from the sustainability team before issuing messages internally or externally.

Above all, the vulnerability of relying on suppliers for scope 3 disclosures needs to be addressed. That means, for example, says Etchanchu, not claiming to be carbon-neutral, a red flag phrase, because a vendor says it is carbon-neutral.

“You will need to do your due diligence and not just take something at face value,” concludes Taylor. “Definitely make sure you have the data to support any claims being made.”