Listening to travel brands, a deafening silence on sustainability

Each Friday, PhocusWire dissects and debates an industry trend or new development covered by PhocusWire that week.

Glenn Fogel, CEO and president of Booking Holdings, one of the biggest and most influential travel brands in the world, said during the company's call with analysts for its first quarter earnings for 2022 this week:

"Finally, as I previewed on our last earnings call, we published our 2021 sustainability report and our Climate Action Plan in March. In our Climate Action Plan, we highlighted the significant emission reductions we've already achieved, in part driven by sourcing 100% renewable energy for our office by the end of last year. And we are committed to more than halving our emissions by 2030 and achieving net zero emissions by 2040.

"We are proud of the emissions reduction achieved and ambitious target set for our business. But as I said before, we believe our greatest influence on sustainable travel is through making it easier for travelers to find and book sustainable options. We are addressing this opportunity to our work with our travel still [Indiscernible] program, which now includes over 100,000 properties that can highlight their sustainable practices to customers on Booking.com."

The comments came at the end of Fogel's opening remarks to the usual group of analysts that tune in at such events, following the traditional run-through of key performance metrics and other elements of the quarterly financial report.

Activists that are pressuring the industry to be more proactive on the sustainability agenda and the sector's impact on climate change - as well as anyone that has concerns about these critical issues - will be pleased that the topic is getting some air time.

They will hope that Booking Holdings and analysts touched further on the strategies being deployed to address the biggest issue that the industry is likely to face in the near future.

And they will hope that similar comments regarding sustainability had been presented by Expedia Group and Airbnb in their calls with financial analysts earlier in the week.

Those hopes will be in vain, however.

Examining the number of mentions of environment-related "sustainable"/"sustainability" (not financial-related) in the earnings statements and the transcripts of the subsequent calls will be a disappointing exercise, as we discovered the following (number of mentions in parentheses):

Booking Holdings

• Earnings statement - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)
• Comments from executives during the investor call - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (4)
• Questions from analysts - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)

Expedia Group

• Earnings statement - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)
• Comments from executives during the investor call - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)
• Questions from analysts - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)

Airbnb

• Earnings statement - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)
• Comments from executives during the investor call - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)
• Questions from analysts - "sustainable"/"sustainability" (0)

Some might consider such a revelation fairly disappointing, while others may say it's almost negligent to not present sustainability at the heart of a company's strategy.

And still others might argue that it illustrates just how far down the pecking order of priorities sustainability is for these three and other companies - or, worse still, how the public pronouncements on sustainability that are made by many travel brands are simply ticking the right boxes on the corporate social responsibility strategy.

Given the seriousness of the climate change situation and the commitments by these leading, powerful companies to address it, it is reasonable to ask why sustainability doesn't figure more - or at all - in these moments when the attention is on them.

We can give them the benefit of the doubt, of course, given that these are generally finance-based discussions and announcements. But Airbnb, for example, talked at length on the call about how its employees can now work from home or how, in the statement, we can "Meet Jason" and learn about his life as a host for the last three years.

Expedia Group, just a few weeks ago, was extremely proud to announce that it had joined the Travalyst coalition of travel brands ("aligning our mission of travel as a force for good") that are working together to form strategies in the sustainability agenda. But such an important move didn't warrant any mention in its latest financial update.

The company has gathered the great and the good of the industry this week in Las Vegas and had two sessions on the published program about sustainability for its partners to attend.

This is encouraging - Expedia Group is trying to engage its hotel customers and others on the agenda. But it and others need to do more to make it more than a passing mention (if at all) in the quarterly updates.

Aside from the earnings statements, many companies will no doubt defend themselves about the lack of sustainability coverage in the analyst calls - probably claiming that they are only responding to what they are asked.

And therein, possibly, is the crux of the problem. If financial analysts fail to bring up sustainability as an important topic of discussion, presumably because such matters are not guiding their money-led thinking, then it will not trigger the debate that it deserves.

At some point in the future, climate change will be impacting on the decisions that financial institutions make as to where to invest, and it will become a major talking point. People react and wake up where money is concerned.

But it will probably be too late to make a difference, when right now making a difference is still achievable.

Much needs to change in the minds of executives in this industry and in the banking community, alongside the decisions being made by consumers. Simply providing information to influence consumer choice is no longer enough.

We look forward to that happening in a meaningful way and sustainability becoming more than barely a footnote in the strategies of companies that can - and should - play a huge role.