In the blink of an eye, business travel went from a high-status activity to an embarrassment.
"Mom, Dad, do you really need to fly?" Following the coronavirus pandemic, Sweden's climate-driven flight-shaming movement “flygskam” went global, with many self-identifying flygskammers ready to pressure their parents, colleagues and even their leaders into staying put. Humanity had never flown so much in the years leading up to 2020, but the planet's climate couldn’t cope. The fixes touted by the airline industry – sustainable aviation fuel (yeh, right) and electric planes (would you fly in one?) – as a response to climate change never took off.
The inconvenient truth was that dumping tons of carbon into the sky wasn’t something that could go on forever. The virus delivered a cosmic message that our travel behavior needed to change, and in the seeming blink of an eye, business travel went from a high-status activity (“You went to Sydney for a conference? Oh, how wonderful”) to an embarrassment (“You went to Sydney for a conference? How could you?”).
Flying for an annual family holiday wasn’t really the problem; it was the frequent business fliers that accounted for the bulk of the damage. The 12% of Americans who made over six round trips a year accounted for two-thirds of global air travel (and each emitted, on average, three tons of carbon a year). Chinese and European fliers weren’t far behind. The post-virus hiatus forced us all to re-examine our flying habits – was it essential to fly halfway across the earth for that two-day meeting? We all dug the face-to-face contact, but Slack, Zoom or Trello broke the corporate hold that the talismanic in-person experience once held.
In the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, governments nudged things along by progressively taxing flights, ratcheting up the cost for each subsequent flight taken by a person throughout the year. Businesses launched innovative workforce policies with extra time off for those who chose to travel sustainably to their meetings or vacations. The slow boat to China came back into fashion. “Work @board” became chic as the four-day trip from Southampton to New York became de rigueur. Companies provided an additional three days’ extra leave a year so employees could travel more slowly – and given ubiquitous WiFi, tablets and noise-canceling headphones, the ability to work on a train and get up and walk to the restaurant car was so much more appealing than the hectic scramble to get to the airport and cram onto a plane. 2023 saw the beginning of a new golden era for train travel, with many European train lines reintroducing sleeper services.
In 2020, when air travel represented one of the largest industries in the world, no government (not even China) had ever forced people to completely stop traveling by plane. But the virus did. Overnight, millions of people stopped flying, marking a profound reduction in carbon emissions, which have declined drastically since their peak in 2019. As horrific an experience as it was, the coronavirus taught us that, yes, we could do something to reverse the damage we’d inflicted on our planet, and it spurred us to take the first steps on the long journey to protect what we have.
As we watched the unthinkable unfold before our eyes, the idea that we couldn’t do hard things evaporated. Business travel, it turned out, was not the engine of commerce we’d thought it was. And those who still hop on a plane to get to a business conference find they’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do. Frequent fliers, it turns out, are no longer cool.
