Thrust Carbon

OVERVIEW: Thrust Carbon builds technology that enables the world’s most forward-thinking companies to offer green products and to operate sustainably. Its mantra is ‘effortlessly green’. Thrust Carbon tools are designed to be effortless to deploy across an organisation. The software products can be used with no set-up and the API solutions have been built so developers can integrate within hours.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website thrust co.

The business offers three core products:

• Thrust Calculator, using hundreds of different data points to provide robust and defensible reporting. This can be integrated across the supply chain and generates visual impact reporting that can be white-labelled.

• Thrust Engage, a suite of behavioural change tools that can create and measure department and personal carbon budgets. More importantly, these are tools that can deliver carbon policy messaging at point-of-sale and on-trip.

• Thrust Offset, providing an independent platform to connect to any carbon offset scheme, presented in an engaging way to increase purchase. Options are given further credibility with the total transparent display of fees.

KEY FACTS: Founder: Mark Corbett
Launch date: Frankfurt, 2019
Experience: Serial entrepreneur and technologist
Geographic reach: Global 
Team: 30 years of travel and tech in founding team, plus UK government, supply chains, and SaaS

CREDENTIALS: Thrust Carbon analyses multiple data points to provide calculations across the entire travel spectrum, using the ICAO methodology, layering both aircraft model and class into the calculations and working to include SAF. Data points from the Cornell Institute and DEFRA are also analysed and updated frequently. The business recently launched the first sustainability tool in the SAP Concur App Centre.

PROPRIETARY PROPOSITION: Thrust Carbon’s proprietary calculators can be easily integrated via API or pre-built solutions and the visually impactful data suite can be white-labelled and can present data at multiple levels, including individual traveller.

TARGET MARKET: Thrust Carbon is targeted at all sustainable-minded businesses in the travel eco-system, dealing with both corporations and offering a reseller agreement for TMCs. Thrust Carbon also provides bespoke services to enterprise clients.

COMMERCIAL MODEL: The business operates a simple subscription-based model and offers an affordable API. Thrust Carbon are committed to a ‘freemium’ entry level for small business and this scales based on volume of records and bulk-discounted offsets are also offered.

BLACK BOX COMMENT: Mark’s energy is infectious, believing wholeheartedly in the company mantra of ‘effortlessly green.’ The effortless approach is truly delivered in the ease of integration and the simplicity of the product suite. The belief that carbon is generated by people not spreadsheets is a powerful one. Thrust Engage delivers on the all-important challenges of presenting credible emissions data at point-of-sale and delivering smart messaging on-trip.

thrustcarbon.com

By Paula Cullen at Black Box Partnerships

Thrust Carbon finds sweet spot in corporate travel programmes

EVERY startup needs to find its product-market-fit moment and it appears that for Thrust Carbon, which came out of an IATA hackathon in 2019, its time has arrived.

According to Glenn Thorsen, director of partnerships, Thrust Carbon started out as an offset API that plugged into airline checkout systems, for individual travellers. Previously, explained Thorsen, the option to offset travel emissions was often just a checkbox (usually ignored) at the end of the checkout process.

Thrust Carbon aimed to offer a level of differentiation by allowing travellers to select the projects their offsets would go towards, generating a greater sense of involvement and better uptake.

In addition to better buy-in, Thrust Carbon also wanted to provide better data. Many carbon calculators, says Thorsen, rely on the same average – a Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) average – that calculates point-to-point distances on maps.

Thorsen explains why this data isn’t good enough, “if you’re flying with a low-cost carrier, for example, they often have more efficient, more modern aircraft, therefore a lower fuel burn that wasn’t being taken into account, if you were flying with an aircraft that had an incredibly high load factor, so the emissions were better distributed across passengers, or perhaps they were good at optimising on cargo… none of those things fed through.

“Even taking into account things like the average circle time at different airports, because if you’re flying into Heathrow, you’re going to be circling for a lot longer than if you fly into Copenhagen or a smaller airport that has a more efficient landing cycle,” and each of these factors affected the level of emissions that travellers would need to offset if they chose. 

At the tail end of 2019, interest was growing, and Thrust Carbon was readying to roll out three pilot programmes, including with Flybe, when the pandemic hit, and (cue the familiar refrain) travel collapsed.

With the knowledge that its system could surface powerful, compelling, emissions data, and the need to pivot, from a survivability standpoint, corporate travel programmes were the obvious next step.

The Thrust Carbon platform aims to make emissions data clear and easily navigable so clients can make sustainable travel decisions. (Image credit: Glenn Thorsen/Thrust Carbon)

“How do we put this in at the corporate level,” asks Thorsen, “corporate programmes [are] spending, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars on travel, and they’re probably going to continue to spend lots of money on travel.

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“But they’re not going to continue as blindly as they did before, from an environmental perspective. They’re going to want better insights and they’re going to want to be able to draw better decision making and no tool is set up to do that,” not then, anyway.

It’s a position that seems to be working for them.

Since signing its first enterprise client at the end of last year, Thorsen says, Thrust Carbon is up to 10 enterprise clients, big names like Novartis and S&P Global among them. It is also in advanced talks with Volvo and Dell.

Having announced a partnership with meetings and technology provider Troop, Thrust Carbon is expanding to provide emissions insights in the MICE space as well.

Recently, Thrust Carbon also signed a partnership with a leading global OBT making it the first data sustainability partner in the app centre.

Though the partnership will likely take some time to roll out (Q2 2022), Thorsen is excited by the prospect of giving programme owners and travellers a dynamic rule that says, for example, “if the emission decreases, you’re allowed to increase the cost 20%”, which gives so much control and flexibility to the travellers”.

For him, “lowest logical emissions’ needs to be a new KPI for corporate clients, before Net Zero.  As he sees it, one of the big undertakings of a net zero initiative is actively reducing and removing emissions, not simply offsetting them – and the only way to start strategising a reduction is to measure and track them to establish baselines.

Glenn Thorsen wants travel programmes to start thinking seriously abut their lowest logical emissions. (Image credit: Glenn Thorsen/Thrust Carbon)

Thorsen puts it in perspective, “When someone searches [a flight from] New York to London today, there’s an emission number, but it’s an average,” he continues, “20 different airlines, 15 different aircraft types, everyone’s got their own load factors on that route level, and they’ve all got the same emission?”

Imagine, he says, going to corporate buyers and offering to give an average fare instead of the lowest logical fare, “they’d never accept that”, so why should our emissions data not be expected to meet equally stringent standards?

The lowest logical emission is a figure, says Thorsen that is readily derived from data that is already in the public domain, from OAG data to the carriers themselves, the difference is that Thrust Carbon has surfaced and integrated that data, and now serves it up to their clients and partners in ways that support making more sustainable travel decisions.

Going back to the example of clients whose emissions reduction strategies were essentially cost/travel reduction strategies, Thorsen explains how Thrust Carbon would approach it differently.

“We look at things like… you’ve got 40% of your emissions down on the Singapore to Sydney route, for example. And currently 80% of your trips on that level are with carrier X if you were to transition those to carrier Y, they have a more modern fleet in place, they have a high load factor… [this is how you can] reduce emissions by anything from 10 to 20%, just by changing carrier choice, not actually reducing travel’.”

That said, not all travel is equal, and Thrust Carbon’s approach allows them to surface some trips that maybe, shouldn’t be flown.

By assigning trips a purpose-code, and applying a no repeat philosophy, for example, a trip could be extended by a few days in order to schedule more meetings per flight, instead of the single-day trips that are the norm.

Thorsen puts this in perspective, “the average programme over $100 million, you’re looking at typically 90% flight emissions [compared to] 5-8% hotel emissions,” the comparable increase of the hotel emissions versus several return flights is almost negligible.

The other thing that sets Thrust Carbon apart, says Thorsen, is the way it views its role.

Starting out with almost a green-travel-as-a-service concept, Thrust Carbon has made transparency and interoperability central to the services it offers. “Everything we’ve built, is web-app based, and API structured from day one, so it’s incredibly flexible. We can hook into reporting layers… we’ve taken the approach that we don’t need to show it in a Thrust box, it should be wherever the client needs it,” says Thorsen.

That, he thinks, will be the more powerful differentiator going forward; the positioning of Thrust Carbon as an emissions intelligence solution that provides partners with accessible dynamic insights, rather than an emissions calculator.

“Hopefully in the very near future [emissions calculations] won’t be a strong differentiator, because as long as that is, we’re all in trouble – If the other calculations that clients are working off are wrong then that’s not good [for the planet],” says Thorsen.

• Featured image credit: Glenn Thorsen/Thrust Carbon

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