Building Responsible Travel Programs

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This week, Senior Editor Mark Rogers is attending thetwo-day Green Travel Summit at the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach, CA. The event is the first fully dedicated forum focused on exploring green travel strategies and their impact on business travel and corporate meetings.

Randy Krumpeck, global sourcing manager of travel and meetings for Sun Microsystems, sat on the panel for the Building a Responsible Travel Program session.

“We have over 500 hotels in our system,” said Krumpeck. “Sun Microsystems utilizes an interactive tool to determine a hotel’s sustainability program and there’s a built-in bias to choose eco-responsible hotels. Early challenges were determining what exact is a green hotel? Are they just checking off a few boxes in an RFP or are they actually eco-friendly?”

Krumpeck mentioned how the company was encouraging its employees to opt for rail travel when possible (limited to the eastern seaboard in the U.S. and points in Europe) and that they were shifting to hiring green limos and renting hybrid cars whenever possible.