What we learned from our recent edie masterclass on measuring and reducing workforce travel emissions
Last month, Roomex joined edie for a 45-minute masterclass dedicated to a part of workforce travel that can easily disappear from the carbon picture: accommodation.
Hosted in partnership with Roomex, Closing the accommodation carbon gap: How to measure and reduce workforce travel emissions brought together Roomex President Keith Watson, Director of Marketing Sam Costello and Melanie Raymond, Key Account Manager at Squake, with edie Intelligence Editor Joshua Neil chairing the discussion.
The session looked at a practical challenge facing businesses with mobile workforces. Construction teams, engineers, infrastructure workers, facilities management staff, retail teams and other employees may need to stay away from home regularly to keep projects and operations moving. Those stays can add up to hundreds or thousands of room nights over the course of a year.
Yet accommodation can still be difficult to see within the wider carbon picture.
A business may already have established processes for monitoring fleet emissions, energy consumption, flights and other areas of business travel. Accommodation data can be spread across booking systems, expense records, suppliers and individual projects, making it harder to establish what those stays contribute to overall travel emissions.
The masterclass explored what businesses can do about that gap and, importantly, how carbon can become part of real-world accommodation decisions alongside cost, location, availability and worker welfare.
For organisations looking at their own workforce travel footprint, that conversation provides a useful place to start.
The first challenge is visibility.
When somebody travels by air, rail or road, there is an obvious journey to measure. Accommodation can be less immediately visible as an emissions source, particularly when stays are booked across multiple projects, locations and suppliers.
For businesses with large mobile workforces, however, the cumulative impact can be significant.
Look at an engineering company sending teams to sites around the UK throughout the year. One employee may stay away for four nights. Another project might require 15 workers to remain near a site for six weeks. Another team might travel home every weekend before returning on Monday morning.
Every one of those decisions creates data that can help the business understand its travel footprint.
Accommodation also sits within a wider journey. Where somebody stays can influence how far they travel to site each day, whether they require a vehicle, how frequently they return home and whether rail is a practical option.
That is why looking at room nights alongside the rest of workforce travel can provide a much clearer picture than treating accommodation as an isolated procurement category.
Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, business travel in vehicles that are not owned or operated by the reporting company sits within Scope 3, Category 6: Business Travel.
Scope 3 reporting is particularly important because it captures indirect emissions associated with business activity. For organisations with travelling workforces, understanding business travel can therefore form part of building a more complete emissions inventory.
Accommodation emissions can also be incorporated into business travel measurement, giving organisations additional visibility over the environmental impact associated with employees staying away for work.
The important point for businesses is consistency.
If accommodation is going to form part of carbon reporting, organisations need a repeatable way of capturing booking activity, applying an appropriate methodology and tracking results from one reporting period to the next.
Without that consistency, it becomes difficult to establish a reliable baseline or demonstrate whether changes to travel policy are having the intended effect.
One of the easiest mistakes in sustainability planning is moving immediately to reduction targets before establishing the quality of the underlying data.
For workforce accommodation, the first exercise can be much simpler: find out what you already know.
How many room nights did your workforce book last year? Where did employees stay? Which projects created the greatest accommodation demand? How long were typical stays? How frequently did the same locations appear? How close were those properties to the relevant sites?
Then there is the carbon question: can those bookings be translated into consistent emissions data?
For many businesses, answering those questions will show them where the gaps are.
A centralised travel programme can make this considerably easier because bookings are already being captured through a common system rather than sitting across separate hotel invoices, employee expense claims and local booking arrangements.
Roomex’s Carbon Reporting service helps businesses track emissions generated by their accommodation bookings, providing a clearer view of the environmental impact associated with workforce stays.
That means sustainability teams can begin with actual travel activity and examine what is happening across their organisation.
A baseline gives context to future decisions.
Suppose a company discovers that the majority of its accommodation emissions are concentrated around three recurring project locations. That is useful information because those locations can become the first places to investigate.
Another organisation might discover that its room nights are relatively dispersed, but employees are travelling home and returning to site frequently during longer projects.
A third might find that teams regularly stay a significant distance from their worksite because accommodation is being selected primarily according to nightly price.
Those organisations have very different travel patterns, so their reduction strategies should be different too.
Carbon reporting becomes far more useful when it helps identify those patterns rather than producing a single annual number.
Sustainability decisions around workforce accommodation cannot happen in isolation.
The people booking accommodation are dealing with practical requirements every day. A property needs to be available on the right dates, within budget and somewhere that allows employees to get to work safely and reliably.
For longer assignments, teams may need parking, kitchens, laundry facilities or enough space to live comfortably away from home. Shift patterns can make location particularly important, while project dates can change at short notice.
The environmental impact of a booking therefore needs to sit alongside several other factors.
Room rates matter, particularly when a business is purchasing hundreds of nights for a single project.
However, the nightly rate does not necessarily tell you the total cost associated with a stay.
A cheaper property further from site could create additional fuel costs, mileage and travel time every day. Multiply that journey across several workers and several weeks, and the wider cost can become substantial.
Looking at accommodation and transport together can therefore produce a better view of both cost and carbon.
Location is one of the most useful levers available to businesses managing field travel.
If accommodation can be found closer to a project site, the daily journey may become shorter. In some cases, employees may be able to walk or use public transport. In others, several miles of vehicle travel can be removed from every working day.
For a one-night stay, that difference may be relatively small. Across a team staying for several weeks, it accumulates.
This is why accommodation procurement and transport planning should speak to one another.
Workforce travel also has to deal with the accommodation market that actually exists.
Major infrastructure projects, events and seasonal demand can all affect availability. Some worksites are in areas with limited accommodation nearby.
A useful sustainability policy needs enough flexibility to recognise those constraints. Carbon data can inform the decision without pretending that every project offers an unlimited choice of properties.
The people staying in the accommodation still need somewhere appropriate to live.
A team completing physically demanding shifts may need parking, cooking facilities, sufficient space and somewhere suitable to rest. Workers on a long assignment have different requirements from an employee attending a one-night meeting.
Travel policies that overlook those realities are unlikely to work well in practice.
The objective is to understand where carbon improvements can reasonably be made while maintaining appropriate accommodation standards for the workforce.
One of the most useful changes businesses can make is to examine the complete pattern around a stay.
Imagine a team of engineers working on a project for six weeks.
Looking exclusively at hotel rates might lead procurement towards the lowest-priced available rooms. Looking at the whole project raises several additional questions.
How far is the property from site? How will the team travel there every morning? Will workers return home every weekend? Could a longer continuous stay reduce repeated journeys? Would self-catering make that longer stay practical? Is rail available for the main journey?
Those questions create a much richer picture of the environmental and commercial impact of the project.
It also moves sustainability away from individual transactions and towards travel planning.
A business with thousands of annual room nights does not need to investigate every booking individually.
Historic booking data can help sustainability and procurement teams identify where attention is likely to have the greatest effect.
Start with volume.
Which locations generate the greatest number of room nights? Which projects repeatedly require employees to stay away? Which teams travel most frequently? Where are average stays longest?
Then examine the booking behaviour around those areas.
Perhaps teams repeatedly use different hotels in the same city. There may be an opportunity to establish preferred properties based on location, price and suitability.
Perhaps a recurring worksite generates significant daily driving because accommodation tends to be booked in a larger town some distance away.
Perhaps short stays are repeatedly being booked for a project that could be structured around fewer, longer stays.
These are the kinds of patterns that become visible when travel data is organised and reviewed consistently.
Long-term and project-based workforce travel creates a particularly interesting sustainability question.
Sending an employee home between every working block can generate repeated journeys. Depending on distance and transport mode, those journeys may contribute significantly to the overall travel footprint of the project.
In some circumstances, staying near site for longer may reduce that repeated travel.
That does not mean a longer stay will automatically produce lower emissions. The answer depends on the journey, property, length of stay and individual circumstances.
It does mean businesses should be able to compare the options.
Accommodation is one part of workforce travel, so reducing its overall footprint may involve looking at how employees reach their destination too.
Where routes and project requirements allow, rail can provide an alternative to road or air travel.
Roomex’s rail booking platform allows businesses to manage rail alongside workforce accommodation, with custom travel policies and booking approvals.
For sustainability teams, bringing these decisions closer together creates an opportunity to look at the complete journey.
Could a worker travel by rail and stay within walking distance of the site? Could a project team use rail for the main journey and local transport once they arrive? Could accommodation location make a lower-carbon travel option practical?
There will be projects where rail simply does not work. A remote construction site with equipment requirements will create different travel needs from a city-centre assignment.
That is precisely why workforce travel sustainability needs to be based on real operational data.
Sustainability teams can establish targets and reporting methodologies, but procurement has considerable influence over what happens next.
Accommodation purchasing decisions happen repeatedly throughout the year.
That makes procurement policy one of the places where carbon ambitions can become practical.
Businesses can review preferred properties based on their suitability for recurring locations, examine proximity to major worksites and introduce sustainability considerations into supplier selection.
They can also identify situations where longer stays, self-catering or rail should be considered during project planning.
The aim is to give bookers useful parameters before the booking happens.
Recurring travel creates particularly useful opportunities.
If a company sends workers to the same site every week, changing the accommodation or travel arrangement can influence dozens or hundreds of future bookings.
That may offer considerably greater value than spending time optimising occasional travel.
Look for patterns such as:
- high-volume project locations
- frequently booked properties
- long-distance daily journeys between accommodation and site
- repeated travel to and from the same project
- locations with viable rail connections
- longer projects where self-catering may be suitable
These are practical areas where procurement, operations and sustainability teams can work together.
Carbon reporting is most useful when the information comes back into the business.
A simple cycle can work well:
Book → measure → analyse → adjust → measure again.
The first reporting period establishes what happened.
The analysis then asks why.
If one project produced a large proportion of accommodation-related emissions, was that because it required a high number of room nights? Were properties far from site? Were workers making repeated journeys home? Was there limited local availability?
Once the reason is understood, teams can decide whether anything could reasonably change the next time a similar project begins.
Perhaps accommodation should be secured earlier to improve local availability. Perhaps a preferred property closer to site should be added. Perhaps self-catering should be considered for longer assignments. Perhaps rail should become the preferred option for a particular route.
The following reporting period then shows whether those changes made a measurable difference.
That feedback loop is what turns carbon data into something operationally useful.
Workforce travel touches a surprising number of departments.
Operations wants employees where they need to be.
Finance wants control over spend.
Procurement wants suitable suppliers and favourable rates.
HR is concerned with employee welfare.
Sustainability teams need reliable emissions information.
Those priorities can pull travel decisions in different directions when everyone is working from separate data.
A shared view of accommodation activity gives those teams something concrete to work from.
Instead of asking whether the organisation should simply “travel less”, they can ask much more useful questions.
Which journeys could realistically change? Which projects create the most room nights? Where is accommodation furthest from site? Which locations offer viable alternatives? What would a change mean for cost and worker welfare?
Those are decisions a business can actually act on.
The conversation with edie reinforced something that is easy to lose when sustainability discussions become dominated by reporting frameworks and annual targets: workforce travel happens in the real world.
Employees need to reach sites. Projects need to stay on schedule. Suitable rooms need to be available. Budgets still matter. People working away need somewhere safe and comfortable to stay.
Carbon therefore needs to become another useful piece of information within those decisions.
For some organisations, the immediate priority will be establishing an accommodation emissions baseline.
For others, the data already exists and the next opportunity is using it to influence procurement or travel policy.
Businesses with large project-based workforces may find that recurring locations and longer stays deserve the most attention.
There is no single booking rule that will work for every workforce, project or location. Better visibility gives businesses the information they need to decide what can change within their own operation.
If the edie masterclass has prompted you to look more closely at your own workforce accommodation, there are five useful places to start.
1. Establish your accommodation baseline
Bring together your room nights, locations, project data and available carbon information. Understand the scale and shape of your current accommodation activity before setting reduction priorities.
2. Identify the biggest patterns
Look for recurring locations, high-volume projects, long stays and teams that travel frequently. These areas are likely to offer the clearest opportunities for investigation.
3. Examine the whole journey
Consider how employees reach their destination, where they stay and how they travel between accommodation and site. Accommodation decisions can influence transport emissions throughout a project.
4. Bring carbon into travel and procurement policy
Give bookers practical guidance that considers carbon alongside cost, location, availability and worker welfare. Review preferred properties and transport options in locations your workforce uses regularly.
5. Keep measuring
Use future reporting periods to understand whether changes are working. Carbon data becomes considerably more valuable when it informs the next round of travel decisions.
Workforce accommodation can represent thousands of individual decisions across a year. Each one creates data that can help businesses understand where people are staying, how travel patterns are developing and where practical opportunities for reducing emissions may exist.
The first job is making that activity visible.
Roomex helps businesses manage workforce accommodation while tracking the emissions generated by their bookings through our Carbon Reporting service. With accommodation, rail, travel policies and reporting brought into the wider travel programme, teams can make decisions based on what is actually happening across their workforce.
Want a clearer picture of the carbon impact of your workforce accommodation? See how Roomex Carbon Reporting can help you measure your current footprint and use that data to inform future travel decisions.
What is the accommodation carbon gap?
Workforce accommodation can represent thousands of individual decisions across a year. Each one creates data that can help businesses understand where people are staying, how travel patterns are developing and where practical opportunities for reducing emissions may exist.
The first job is making that activity visible.
Roomex helps businesses manage workforce accommodation while tracking the emissions generated by their bookings through our Carbon Reporting service. With accommodation, rail, travel policies and reporting brought into the wider travel programme, teams can make decisions based on what is actually happening across their workforce.
Are hotel stays included in Scope 3 emissions?
Business travel is covered under Scope 3, Category 6 of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Accommodation emissions can also be included when organisations calculate the impact associated with business travel and employee stays.
How can businesses measure emissions from workforce accommodation?
Businesses first need consistent accommodation data, including information such as room nights and locations. Appropriate emissions factors or carbon calculation methodologies can then be applied to that activity. Roomex Carbon Reporting helps businesses track emissions generated by accommodation bookings made through the platform.
How can businesses reduce emissions from workforce accommodation?
Potential measures include choosing accommodation closer to worksites, reviewing recurring high-volume locations, considering longer stays where they could reduce repeated journeys, using rail where practical and incorporating carbon considerations into travel and procurement policies. The most appropriate approach depends on the workforce, location and operational requirements.
Can self-catering accommodation support a more sustainable travel strategy?
It can form part of one. Self-catering may make longer stays more practical for employees by providing facilities such as kitchens and laundry. Where a longer stay reduces repeated journeys to and from a project, businesses can compare the overall carbon impact with alternative arrangements. The outcome depends on the individual project and travel pattern.
Why does accommodation location matter for carbon emissions?
The location of accommodation can influence the distance employees travel to and from a worksite every day. For teams staying away for several weeks, even a relatively small reduction in the daily journey can accumulate across multiple workers and shifts. Location should therefore be considered alongside price, availability, facilities and worker welfare.
How can procurement teams support lower-carbon workforce travel?
Procurement teams can use historic booking and emissions data to identify recurring locations, review preferred accommodation, consider proximity to worksites and incorporate sustainability criteria into travel policies and supplier decisions. High-volume and repeat travel can be a useful place to focus because changes can influence many future bookings.
What is Roomex Carbon Reporting?
Roomex Carbon Reporting helps businesses understand the environmental impact associated with their accommodation bookings. By connecting carbon information with booking activity, organisations can build greater visibility over workforce stays and use the resulting data to support sustainability reporting, travel policy and future procurement decisions.
