Event report: BTA conference
Sustainable travel, duty of care and cyber security were all hot topics at the BTA Winter Conference, reports Sasha Wood.
The rapid shift towards sustainable travel was a key talking point at the Business Travel Association’s annual domestic conference, while duty of care and assessing travel risks were also up for discussion ahead of the new ISO Travel Risk Management Guidance Standard coming into effect next year.
Themed ‘A Different View’, the conference gathered together around 200 attendees at the Congress Centre in Central London. Opening his first conference as CEO, Clive Wratten said: “The BTA has tried to bring a different view of the industry, inviting new faces to speak.” Those new faces included senior airline and ground transport staff, as well as experts from the worlds of risk and cyber security.
During a session covering ‘a different view on crime’, the panel addressed some of the threats facing business travellers, and how to manage the risk using the new ISO Standard.
“Corporates are concerned about the new standard, and travel managers want to know about it,” says Global Security Accreditation’s Nick Hawkins. "If businesses want to comply, the old RFP tickbox won’t work.”
Cyber expert Michael Aminzade from technology consultancy 6point6 said business travellers are high value targets, vulnerable to hacking threats in the airport lounge and coffee shops. Offering a few snippets of advice for improving iphone security, Aminzade says travellers can use verified wifi hotspots, connectors that isolate data pins for public charging points, and download a firewall app.
Addressing the current zeitgeist, easyjet's Robert Carey shared an update on its first quarter as a net zero carbon airline. It offset 800,000 tons of carbon from all nine million passengers at a cost of £25million, making it the world's biggest purchaser of carbon credits. The airline did this as a voluntary measure, without raising fares. “We thought this is the best thing we can do in the world right now,” said Carey.
Sustainability on the ground is gaining traction too. Avis' Louisa Bell says the car hire company is noticing “a trend towards paying for access to services rather than ownership”.
Avis-owned Zipcar currently has 300 fully electric cars operating in London, and Bell says by 2025 the whole fleet will be electric with 9,000 vehicles accessible. Gary Mcleod of Traveleads says it plans to use fully electric vehicles by 2023 if the infrastructure is there. Both Mcleod and Bell have noticed corporate clients asking about emissions and offsets.
• This event took place before the global coronavirus outbreak began affecting business travel programmes in the UK.