The questions that didn't used to be on the agenda
A travel programme used to be judged on three things: average ticket price, hotel rate compliance, and whether the booking tool worked when somebody was running for a flight. Those metrics still matter. But sit in any finance committee meeting now and you'll hear a fourth conversation creeping in — one about Scope 3 emissions, ESG disclosure, and whether the company's travel spend can stand up to the kind of scrutiny that used to be reserved for the supply chain. The travel-management company (TMC) sitting on the other end of the contract is suddenly being asked to do work it wasn't originally built for. Which means the CFO needs a sharper set of questions before signing the next renewal.
Here's what to put on the table.
1. "Show me how you actually calculate emissions — line by line"
Most TMCs will say they report on carbon. Fewer can tell you, without flinching, which methodology they use, where the emission factors come from, and how often those factors are updated. The standard reference points are GHG Protocol for corporate accounting and either DEFRA or ICAO methodologies for transport. Ask which.
Then go a layer deeper. For flights, are they using great-circle distance or actual routing? Are they accounting for cabin class (a business-class seat carries a much heavier footprint than economy)? Are they applying a radiative forcing multiplier for non-CO₂ effects at altitude — and if so, which one? For hotels, are they using a flat per-night assumption, or are they pulling property-level data where available?
You don't need your CFO to become a carbon accountant. You need your TMC to be one.
2. "What does your data look like when our auditor asks for it?"
ESG disclosure is moving from voluntary to mandatory in a growing list of jurisdictions, and travel sits squarely inside Scope 3, Category 6 (business travel) — one of the categories most companies historically fudged. If your business is in scope for CSRD, SEC climate rules, or any of the parallel frameworks, your auditor will want a defensible trail.
So ask: can the TMC produce a report that ties each trip to a verifiable emission calculation, with the methodology stated, the data source named, and a timestamp on when it was generated? Can they hand you machine-readable exports rather than PDFs that someone has to retype into the sustainability platform? Can they support the data structures your ESG software expects?
If the answer is "we'll get back to you," that's the answer.
3. "How do you handle offsets — and are you comfortable defending them?"
The voluntary carbon market has had a bruising couple of years. Investigations into avoided-deforestation projects, questions about additionality, and a general tightening of what regulators consider a credible offset claim have all chipped away at the easy story TMCs used to tell.
The CFO question isn't "do you offset?" It's:
- Which registries do you use, and why those?
- What's the split between avoidance and removal credits in your portfolio?
- How do you handle vintage — are credits being retired close to the year of emission, or are you drawing on old stock?
- If a journalist or NGO publishes a critical report on one of your project types, what's your response plan?
A TMC that can't answer the last one is a reputational risk dressed up as a sustainability solution. And increasingly, regulators in the UK, EU and elsewhere are policing how the word "carbon neutral" can be used in corporate communications. The CFO is the person who carries that liability.
4. "Where are the levers to actually reduce — not just measure?"
Measurement is table stakes. Reduction is harder, and it's where most travel programmes still hit a wall. Push the TMC on the practical levers they can put inside the booking flow:
- Display logic. Are lower-emission flight options surfaced visibly, or buried two clicks deep? Does the tool show carbon alongside price by default?
- Rail-over-air nudges. On routes where rail is realistic — Paris–London, Madrid–Barcelona, much of the Northeast Corridor — does the system offer it, or do travellers default to the airport because that's what the tool shows first?
- Hotel filters. Can a traveller filter for properties with credible third-party certifications? And is the certification list curated, or does it accept any green-sounding logo?
- Trip consolidation. Are there reports flagging multiple short trips to the same city by the same team, where one longer visit would have done the job?
Reduction lives in the small choices. A TMC that sells you a dashboard but never changes a default has not actually changed anything.
5. "What happens to traveller behaviour over time?"
Behavioural change in corporate travel is famously sticky. A traveller who has flown business-class to New York for fifteen years is not enthusiastic about being told the train works fine to Brussels. So ask the TMC what they actually do about this — beyond an annual email from the head of sustainability.
Good answers tend to involve some combination of:
- Pre-trip prompts that surface a lower-carbon alternative at the moment of booking, not afterwards.
- Department-level dashboards so team leaders can see their own footprint trending against peers.
- Policy support — helping you write travel policies that have teeth without being miserable to live under.
- Honest reporting on which interventions move the numbers and which don't.
Bad answers involve the word "education" used as a verb, with no follow-through.
6. "How does your hotel content stack up on sustainability?"
Flights get most of the carbon attention because they're the biggest line item. But hotels are where the data quality often falls apart. Self-reported sustainability claims are the norm, certifications vary wildly in rigour, and many TMC hotel programmes still treat green credentials as a nice-to-have filter rather than a content strategy.
Press for specifics. Which certifications does the TMC accept, and have they assessed the methodology behind each one? Do they distinguish between properties with audited environmental management systems and those that put a "we reuse towels" card in the bathroom? Can they tell you what proportion of bookings in your programme go to properties with verified credentials — and is that share moving in the right direction?
If the hotel content is weak, a clean flights story is only half a programme.
7. "What's your position on AI — and does it work for us or against us?"
AI is now in the booking stack whether you asked for it or not. Some of it is genuinely useful: agents that can compare options across more variables than a human ever would, including carbon. Some of it is a black box that simply cannot explain why it recommended what it recommended.
For a CFO, the questions are governance questions. What data is the TMC's AI trained on? Can it surface the reasoning behind a recommendation in an auditable way? Does it optimise on price alone, or can it weight carbon, policy compliance, and traveller wellbeing in a configurable way? And — increasingly relevant — does the use of AI in booking decisions need to be disclosed under any of your existing governance frameworks?
The right AI in a travel programme is a force multiplier on every other question on this list. The wrong AI hides the answers.
8. "How do you price the sustainable option?"
This is the question travel managers most often dread, because the honest answer is sometimes "more." Sustainable aviation fuel costs more than kerosene. Certified hotels sometimes carry a small premium. Rail isn't always cheaper than the budget flight.
What you want from the TMC is transparency, not magic. Show the cost delta. Help build a shadow-price model so the company can decide internally what a tonne of CO₂ is worth — and apply that consistently across decisions. Don't bury the trade-off; surface it, so the business can make adult choices about where it spends.
The programmes that work are the ones that stop pretending sustainability and procurement are the same conversation.
The framing that pulls it together
None of these questions are really about travel. They're about whether the company can stand behind its numbers when somebody outside the building — a regulator, an auditor, an investor, a journalist — comes asking. A TMC that treats sustainability as a slide in the pitch deck is a problem disguised as a partner. A TMC that treats it as part of the operating model is doing the CFO's job for them.
If you're rebuilding a corporate travel stack with this lens in mind, it's worth knowing what's possible on the consumer side too. IMPT's hotel platform offsets a tonne of CO₂ per booking on-chain, paid from our own commission rather than tacked onto the traveller's bill — useful as a reference point for what verifiable, line-item climate action looks like in practice. The IMPT shop, card, and token sit alongside it for the same reason: every transaction leaves a trail you can actually point to. That's the standard worth holding any travel partner against, whether they're booking your offsite or your annual leave.