AmTrav Makes it Easy to Make CO2-Smart Choices and Track Your Impact

This week AmTrav launched two new tools that help you track your company’s carbon dioxide emissions and allow your bookers to compare the emissions between different flight and rail options:

Detailed CO2 reporting: Need to track your company’s CO₂ emissions? It’s easy to see your CO₂ emissions from air and rail travel in AmTrav’s new CO₂ Report, your Air Spend Report, and at-a-glance in your Company Dashboard. Historical data is available dating back to 2018. You and your travelers can also see your individual impact and miles traveled in your individual Dashboard.

Informed itinerary selection: CO₂ emissions estimates for each flight and rail result on the Flights Results page help bookers choose efficient flights, including the most-efficient flights flagged as “Green Choice” and detailed CO₂ emissions estimates in the Fare Details and Compare Fares modules.

Thanks to AmTrav client Hexagon, whose Mining division (among others) encouraged AmTrav to develop these features. Their Travel Administrator Laura says: “While Hexagon helps customers to be more sustainable, it is also committed to elevating its own ESG standards. Receiving data-driven guidance from AmTrav to find lower-CO₂ flights and to track CO₂ emissions totals is an important part of this commitment.”

As with everything AmTrav develops, delivering accurate data was important. "This is not a box checking exercise for us,” said AmTrav CEO Jeff. “When we set out to add carbon emissions data, we committed to doing it right. There are lots of tools out there that use formulas that are so generic, they’re almost worthless. We took a lot of extra time to make sure we can properly account for the relative difference in emissions between one aircraft type and another so travelers can actually use the data to make more efficient choices.”

Indeed, AmTrav checked several data sources before developing our own emissions methodology based on ICAO CO₂ datasets. AmTrav first estimates aircraft and Amtrak train fuel consumption for every aircraft model based for different flight or rail lengths*, then assigns a portion of that burn to each seat based on the seat count and each seat’s dimensions that AmTrav tracks, then converts that fuel burn to per-seat CO₂ emissions. This means that a seat on a 175 seat Southwest Boeing 737-800 shows lower CO₂ emissions than a seat on a 160 seat Delta Boeing 737-800, and a Main Cabin seat shows lower CO₂ emissions than a Comfort Plus seat or First Class seat on that Delta 737, and flights with stops have different emissions than nonstop flights.

Additional information about AmTrav’s CO₂ tools are available in the Knowledge Base FAQ.

*Did you know that per-mile aircraft fuel consumption follows a parabolic curve (aka a U shape)? It does, and our data reflects this -- high for short flights, lower for medium-haul flights then high for long haul flights.