Travelport's Top Product Exec on the Folly of Carbon Offsetting

25.08.2023 - 14:27 / skift.com / Peden Doma Bhutia

Are carbon offset programs bad news? In many ways, believes Tom Kershaw, Travelport’s chief product and technology officer, making a case for more measurable and achievable ways to reach environmental goals.

Kershaw told Skift during an interview recently that offset programs are often abused and are usually cheap and easy answers to make people feel less guilty. “And cheap and easy ain’t the way out,” according to him.

He further mentioned that a lot of the offset dollars go to owners of forests or green areas to not cut down trees and there is proof that those dollars didn’t really prevent anything.

“The offset dollars create an industry that makes money off of it, and for which I have huge distrust,” he said.

“Also, it doesn’t mathematically add up. Do we really know how many trees we’d have to plant to offset what’s happening?”

An earlier European Union study supports Kershaw’s position, reporting that 85 percent of offsets had failed to reduce emissions.

Talking about the fear against offset programs, Rachel Kyte, co-chair of the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, said during a Radio Davos podcast, “Observers fear that companies are using carbon offsets as part of a sort of generic net zero or carbon neutrality pledge before taking necessary steps to reduce emissions.”

A majority of travelers — 87 percent — said that they want to travel sustainably, according to the new Sustainable Travel Report released by Booking.comon Earth Day this year.

Skeptical of surveys and studies that talk about how people are willing to pay more to travel sustainably, Kershaw said those responses may look good on surveys and studies, but the reality may be a bit different.

He very matter-of-factly mentioned that when asked if they would be willing to pay more money to not destroy the planet, there is a slim chance people would say no.

“Try making them part with the money or take a layover that takes three additional hours or a six-hour train ride instead of a 30-minute plane ride and the reality would be there to see.”

A Vacationer survey last year had stated that the older a survey respondent was, the less likely they were willing to spend more on a vacation to lower their carbon footprint.

Kershaw noted that people are right now pretty much left to their own devices as there is no standardization in the measurement tools for sustainability, or agreement about what it is that we’re measuring.

He said that sustainability for individual consumers is currently too expensive and too hard to understand. An earlier Skift story had also mentioned how travelers are confused by sustainable travel.

The Travelport executive, however, believes that corporate travel is where all the action is going to be.

He’s not