The EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will be introduced in January 2024. The directive will require companies with as few as 500 staff to report on the sustainability impact of their corporate travel.
It was previously established for larger companies being required to report its sustainability impact of their corporate travel. However, with the CSRD, around 11,500 public interest companies across the EU will have to comply with the new rules in regards to monitoring travel during 2024 and subsequently report on them publicly in the following year.
Traxo founder and CEO Andres Fabris said: “The CSRD highlights another challenge for companies that don’t have adequate travel management programmes in place. Companies will need to report on scope 3 emissions as part of the directive, which includes their business travel. But they can only report on business travel that they can monitor and are aware of; in other words, they won’t be able to capture bookings made outside of the system.”
Digitrips managing director Emilie Dumont added: “How does a company determine which parts of an employee’s trip was for work and which were for leisure? An employee might take a long-haul trip through their company, but might tag on a holiday and, as a result, book one less leisure flight than they otherwise would have. It’s going to be a logistical challenge, and companies need to develop strategies and calculations that take this into account.”
Morgann Lesne from Travel investment bank Cambon Partners said: “It’s best to start preparing for that now rather than finding out at the last minute that this is a deal-breaker as data-collection and compliance takes much longer to do than any timeframe for an equity event.”