Goodwings CEO on easy sustainable business travel

Justin Schuster

Thank you for tuning in today to the Travel is a Human Emotion podcast. My name is Justin Schuster and I’m the SVP of Marketing at Spotnana. I couldn’t be more delighted to tell you that my guest today is Christian Moeller Hølst, CEO of Goodwings.

Christian, can you give us an overview of what Goodwings does and who some of your customers are?

Christian Møller-Hølst

Sure, and first of all, thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure. We are a travel management company, so our clients are businesses, and we help those businesses manage their business travel as efficiently and as responsibly as humanly possible. We provide them with an online booking tool — I’m sure we’ll get into that — but also great, first-class service by experienced agents who pick up the phone on weekends to service clients when they’re in need. On top of that, we build our own proprietary climate technology to help companies report and reduce emissions.

We’re based in Copenhagen — I’m here in the office now. Our clients range from small companies, but the vast majority are mid-size and some enterprise clients. We are growing increasingly upstream, I would say, spanning more than 30 different industries. The majority are here in Europe — Northern Europe, I would say — but we do have clients in most parts of the world: Singapore, Australia, and North America, both the US and Canada. I usually say our footprint runs from Switzerland and up, which gives people a good sense of where we are in the world.

Justin Schuster

Fantastic. A key part of what differentiates Goodwings in the market is your focus on sustainability. There are a lot of different tools for booking and managing travel out in the world. What was the gap that you identified around sustainability that you felt needed to be filled?

Christian Møller-Hølst

Sustainability is something everybody talks about, but very few actually take action on. My background is in philosophy of business, and I believe we need to find a way of turning business into a force for good. To do that, we need to make sustainability more affordable and more accessible for companies of all sizes — because not all companies are a Microsoft, a Google, or a Merck. Those have huge teams of ESG professionals. But if you look at the workforce in Europe, 80% of the European workforce is employed by small and mid-sized companies.

Fortunately, sustainability is increasingly being seen as a real business risk — but that also means it’s an opportunity. More and more clients, partners, and employees — future talent — expect you to demonstrate climate leadership in some shape or form. It doesn’t have to be highly advanced, but you need to show that you’re taking responsibility and actually reducing your emissions year on year.

In many industries, like professional services, business travel accounts for more than 80% of emissions. We have a lot of architecture and management consulting clients who don’t emit much in their scope one and two — their office building, maybe a company car, supplies — but the vast majority of their emissions are scope three: business travel. For those types of companies, business travel is significantly material. That means you need the right tools for measuring and, later, for reporting.

You need accurate data, consistency over time — so you’re not jumping from one greenhouse gas framework to another — and granularity. You also need to set targets, because if you don’t have a target, you have nothing to steer towards. Otherwise, you’re just emitting, and at the end of the year you put a figure in your report.

Our software helps clients set targets and distribute them throughout the organization using a waterfall model. So our clients ultimately have a budgetary target and an associated carbon target for business travel. With our solution, you can set a target, distribute it, and monitor your emissions in real time. That gives companies a competitive advantage because throughout the year they’re actually able to make the right decisions and tighten their travel policies here and there to drive carbon reductions. For many companies, it becomes a material year-on-year achievement that they can reference in their annual non-financial reporting. If you’re doing it well, you can demonstrate to the world that you’re taking serious steps — not just continuing business as usual and buying cheap offsets from a methane gas project in China or old deforestation credits in Eastern Europe. You’re actually doing the right thing.

Justin Schuster

This is huge — being able to get emissions reporting in real time, set targets, and measure progress toward them. One of the things out there is the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which has been delayed a bit but should be coming into effect soon. Do you feel like compliance requirements are one of the things driving interest, and that your tool makes it simpler for companies to meet those requirements?

Christian Møller-Hølst

Absolutely. The whole CSRD greenhouse gas regime, which unfortunately got postponed, created a lot of demand two, three, four years ago. The good thing is that the delay was communicated quite late, so a lot of companies had already put a lot of things in motion and didn’t walk away from them. So legislation did create demand — but I think people are underestimating the expectations coming from future talent.

There is some demand from capital markets — pension funds expecting companies to drive real decarbonization and report on it. But I think the real demand comes from the talent pool. If you want to attract the bright minds of tomorrow, they’re young, they care about the paycheck, but they don’t compromise. So you need to be able to prove that you’re taking real steps to improve your environmental footprint. And for many companies, that means business travel.

Justin Schuster

It matters quite a bit to me. We were talking beforehand about our various backgrounds — I went to Haas Business School and corporate social responsibility was a big theme there. I think what you’re doing is really wonderful. And I love how Goodwings not only gives you the reporting, but also the ability to take action — purchasing offsets, working with VCS-verified reforestation programs, and subsidizing sustainable aviation fuel purchases. What kind of uptake are you seeing on that?

Christian Møller-Hølst

There is demand for offsets. Offsets come in many different shapes, forms, and levels of quality. You have reforestation and afforestation — planting trees where they did or didn’t exist before — and then you have deforestation credits, which are associated with preventing trees from being cut down.

The Guardian published a fairly harsh critique of the offset market about 18 to 24 months ago, and that shook things up a bit. Emissions are increasing — not just in travel, but overall — and the planet needs some way to cope with that. Re-greening the earth in any shape or form is a positive thing. But you should go for higher-quality, more expensive offsets. We only invest in VCS-verified reforestation because, while I appreciate deforestation credits, it’s relatively difficult to measure the impact of not cutting down a tree. So we hold a portfolio of high-quality credits — because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it reduces risk for our clients.

Our market is not exactly filled with travel management companies obsessed with doing the right thing. A lot of our competitors have plenty of green products on the shelf, but when you look closely, you need to be a bit nerdy about this. If you’re not, you end up creating risk for your clients — and that’s the last thing you want. So by providing access to high-quality offsets, and now also sustainable aviation fuel credits, we’re offering something our clients are increasingly open to. Not all clients are opting into sustainable aviation fuel because it’s still many times more costly, but it’s the right thing to do. We need to contribute to the transition away from fossil fuel dependency. We can’t expect airlines to do it themselves, especially when everyone is so price-focused and airlines are delivering exactly what we’re willing to pay for. So we need to find ways of breaking this status quo.

Denmark and Europe have some of the leading technology providers in sustainable aviation fuel production. The Danish company Hopsur is one of the leading providers. We currently have five eSAF projects — sustainable aviation fuel that doesn’t come from bio-based feedstock, but from a technological process — that are just waiting to reach final investment decision. They’re not able to do so because they can’t demonstrate enough demand. Why? Because airlines are only doing what the EU mandates, for good reason — they’re trying to make a profit. So we need the private sector to realize it has a role to play in driving this demand.

That’s why we offer our clients ways to purchase sustainable aviation fuel credits, and we also offer ways to co-finance projects if a client commits to a long-term contract.

Justin Schuster

As you’re saying, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here. We need to create the marketplace and ensure demand is strong enough to get these projects off the ground and supply the market with greater access to sustainable aviation fuel. A lot of people really do care about the planet and want to take action. But I also see many companies that don’t seem to be doing much about it — there’s a split in the market. People say sustainability is important, but often don’t act on it. There’s also clearly a regional difference; Europe seems far more forward-thinking in this regard. What’s your advice to companies that are struggling to take action on sustainability? How do you help them get into the right mindset and take that first step?

Christian Møller-Hølst

You need to explain the business case as a trinity, because nobody is doing it purely for moral reasons. Some are — I think that tends to be family-owned businesses where there’s a legacy of doing the right thing even without a direct ROI. But most companies are open to becoming more sustainable, even investing in it, if there’s a clear business opportunity. And there are plenty.

Some of our best-performing clients are consulting firms serving other businesses globally. Some of them simply cannot participate in RFPs or bid processes if they can’t provide accurate greenhouse gas reporting. So the data we deliver actually unlocks business opportunities for them. You need to explain the business value. Once you do that and get senior management buy-in, any company can find a budget for it. It doesn’t need to be a large budget — but if more and more companies contribute, you actually start to solve this chicken-and-egg problem.

Justin Schuster

The solution you’ve put together has a number of key components — a sustainability suite, booking technology, and travel servicing capabilities — all delivered as one integrated solution. You chose to use Spotnana for the booking technology and JTB for the servicing capability. Can you walk us through how you thought about that approach?

Christian Møller-Hølst

I don’t think anyone can be the best at everything. We wanted to provide a whole, aggregated solution — one that included a booking engine not burdened by legacy technical debt. On the contrary, we wanted a booking tool that was flexible, fast, and agile — able to access new types of content and payment options, and put our clients in the driver’s seat when it comes to structuring their organizational hierarchy with cost centers, legal entities, and so on. We found that Spotnana delivers exactly that.

I would also say that I’m very appreciative of the openness from Spotnana when I bring client needs to you. The turnaround time is very admirable. We still have a long way to go in Europe, because Europe is not one market — it’s multiple markets, with multiple types of content, API connections, and payment methods. Unlike the US, truly serving Europe requires something extra, and I think you’re realizing that and being very supportive.

Then there’s fulfillment. The business travel industry is interesting because it’s very binary. You have the legacy mega-TMCs — the BCD, the CWT, the AmEx GBT becoming one huge entity. That actually opens up tremendous opportunity for us. But you want a fulfillment partner that has global coverage and a genuine commitment to real service when clients need it. JTB does that. Being a Japanese company, they take client needs very seriously. Their agents are issuing tickets and answering calls under the Goodwings name, across the world, in multiple languages. That truly enables me and my team to focus on what we do best — understanding the particular requirements of European companies, because they vary a lot. Denmark and Sweden are similar but still have their own requirements. Go to Germany, it’s a different thing. Switzerland, Italy — different again.

Relying on Spotnana as a technology provider that delivers what we need today while already looking at what we’ll need tomorrow, and on JTB to service clients, enables us to focus on winning business, doing key account management, and continuing to build out our climate technologies. That’s been the strategy from the beginning — not to kid ourselves that we could do everything at once.

Justin Schuster

Let’s talk a bit about your vision for building out the sustainability technology. I feel like AI has taken over the conversation in the travel industry, but there’s important innovation happening in other areas too, including sustainability. What are the big sustainability innovations you delivered last year that you want everyone to know about, and what are you thinking about for the future?

Christian Møller-Hølst

Over the past year or two, we’ve been focusing very much on granularity in emission calculations, because that has increasingly become a topic of importance — especially in relation to the CSRD, but also for Science Based Targets initiative-approved clients. One of our larger clients recently received an email from their auditor — one of the Big Four — who shared with me that he had never seen that level of granularity in a business travel emission calculation until now. That was very gratifying to hear.

Our emission forecasting tool is also something we take great pride in, because it enables clients to do scenario building throughout the year. If I tighten my travel policy — not allowing business class on, say, four-to-ten-hour flights, or not allowing flights at all and mandating rail on certain routes — we can model the impact. We can also prompt travelers: if you’re making four trips a month between Copenhagen and London, maybe we’ll flag that and say, ‘Is there any way you can bundle those trips? You’re traveling the same route quite frequently. Perhaps staying an extra night in London would work — the cost would be about the same, swapping a return ticket for a hotel night, but your emissions could be reduced by up to 50%.’ These are tools our clients are responding well to, and we plan to invest more in them.

We are now also officially a Science Based Targets initiative signatory, which is very close to my heart. I think all companies should take climate science seriously and act accordingly. Our own internal reductions are modest compared to the savings we strive to unlock for our clients, but it’s about having that SBTi validation to underscore the rigor and data quality we bring to this work — and to live up to the same standards we ask our clients to meet.

Moving forward, we’ve taken initial steps to try to solve the chicken-and-egg problem — this global issue that isn’t unique to travel. We’re living our lives, consuming, emitting. We know solutions exist, but they aren’t being realized because without visible demand, they’re not reaching final investment decision and becoming investable and bankable. Right now, we have 12 out of 15 eco-tipping points either at risk or soon to be reached. That’s a real issue. We need to acknowledge our interdependence — as a travel management company, as an airline, as a business, as a traveler — and find ways to come together to create the demand that will allow producers of new fuel types and sustainable alternatives to oil to come to life. We have the technology. The problem is we’re not scaling it up.

Turning more climate science into tools and functionality is something I’m — my wife would say obsessed about, and my board would agree. But thankfully, we’re seeing more and more clients respond well to it. Contrails are one area we’ll definitely invest in. The white streaks you see behind airplanes can actually have more negative impact on climate change than the CO2 itself. Those streaks can become up to 8 to 12 kilometers wide — very thin clouds that increase the greenhouse gas effect. During the day, the negative impact is partially balanced because they also reflect sunlight. But at night, there’s no sun — so you only have the increased greenhouse gas effect. This means that flying in the northern hemisphere during winter at night, the contrail effect could be up to 10 times that of the CO2 alone. I think travelers would want to know that.

Turning this into tools and functionality is something we’ll pursue. If you have a red-eye flight and a daytime flight at the same cost, and the daytime option might actually be more convenient, that’s a real choice that travelers can make. Primary data is a third area we’ll investigate more — meaning we’ll find ways to access actual aircraft data rather than using averages when calculating emissions for our clients. That will allow us to show, for example, that a particular airline actually emits more on a route to New York than another airline does. Ultimately, it’s all about driving behavior. We want to route clients onto the flights and airlines with the least negative impact — all while working with the industry and with airlines to unlock the sustainable aviation fuel transition. It’s a lot to take in.

Justin Schuster

It’s a very worthwhile endeavor, and I’m glad you’re pursuing it, Christian. To close things out — this is the Travel is a Human Emotion podcast — when you reflect on the connection between travel and human emotions, what comes to mind for you?

Christian Møller-Hølst

It’s a very simple answer: traveling is one of the most human things we do. There’s been a lot of news about Greenland the past few months. I was actually reading the Danish news yesterday, and they found evidence that people have been living in remote areas of Greenland for the last 5,000 years. It struck me that humanity has moved from Ethiopia to basically every corner of the world. Movement is part of our DNA.

I think at this point in time, with the current geopolitical climate, we need to move — because we need to meet, and we need to meet in order to understand. We need to move, to experience, to understand, to create, to co-create the future we want for ourselves and for our children and future generations. The travel sector facilitates that. That’s really its beauty. It’s not just about going to Hawaii on your honeymoon — it’s about connecting people.

And if you’re doing that while preventing a habitable future on this earth, there is a real contradiction. The travel sector, of all sectors, should be in the driver’s seat on this — and it’s not. That’s my daily motivation: how do we transform the travel sector into a better version of itself.

Justin Schuster

Christian, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you today.

Christian Møller-Hølst

Thank you so much for having me.