Lucas Bobes, Group Environmental Officer, Amadeus, in an interview with TravTalk, highlights why sustainability has become a defining priority for the global tourism industry. He shares insights on how responsible travel practices, data-driven decision-making, and collaboration across the travel ecosystem can significantly reduce environmental impact.
TT Bureau
Why is tech increasingly central to sustainability in tourism?
Technology is becoming a key lever for sustainability because it improves the efficiency of critical travel processes, and efficiency gains often translate into lower environmental impact. Amadeus IT solutions can help various travel providers to reduce their emissions per passenger. In this sense, our role is to help airlines, airports, travel sellers, travellers, and other travel stakeholders to operate in ways that are both more efficient and more sustainable.
Can you give an example of how operational improvements reduce emissions?
With the use of advanced IT solutions that help airlines estimated critical factors like demand or probability of disruptions, we can help airlines to make three of the most important decisions airlines have to make to not only be profitable, but also efficient and environmentally advanced. These decisions are where to fly, with what type of aircraft, and when. Correct decisions in this respect mean a reduced environmental impact per passenger flown. Even though airlines have an average above 80 per cent load factor, this still means that approximately every year there are 1 billion empty seats in aircraft. If we can help airlines to improve just a little fraction on that, the result is significant in absolute terms.
Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is seen as the key short and medium term solution for aviation decarbonisation. What is Amadeus doing in this space?
We focus on enabling voluntary SAF contributions during the travel purchasing process to facilitate access and adoption. Working with airlines and sales channels, we integrate options for both individual and corporate travellers to add SAF to their bookings. However, adoption remains low due to at least two fundamental barriers: the high price and the need for clearer regulation and a more transparent market.
What role does communication play in SAF adoption?
It’s essential. Travellers must clearly understand the value of their contribution. If the environmental impact is not explained in a transparent and comparable way at the moment of purchase, it becomes difficult for them to justify the additional cost. We need to bear in mind that the time travellers spend on a booking process is extremely scarce.
