Video conferencing is now a strong competitor to the airline industry. That’s not the usual puff from the video-conferencing industry – it’s from the top of the airline world.
The growing promise of video conferencing was noted – in passing – by Giovanni Bisignani, the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) director general and CEO, in a speech entitled “State of the Air Transport Industry” at the IATA annual general meeting and World Air Transport Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in June. It was reported in newspapers and the aviation industry trade press.
That videoconferencing’s share of the global meeting-time pie has become large enough to garner IATA’s attention is interesting enough, but what is more interesting still is what the remark means in light of the airline industry’s overall approach to environmental sustainability.
IATA: growth, growth growth
But first, some context: . The IATA, representative of the entire airline industry, is totally committed to perpetual growth in carrying capacity as the basis for its future business strategy, both in the short and long term.
The industry’s airlines have already placed orders for approximately 4,000 new aircraft that are scheduled for delivery over the next three years. According to IATA, that number represents a renewal of 17 percent of the existing commercial fleet. Making that investment, decided upon in better economic times, pay for itself in the here and now will require highly effective operational efficiencies, cost cutting, and as much passenger growth as can be squeezed from the market.
Meanwhile, IATA has set itself goals for reducing the airline industry’s emissions that it calls more ambitious than that of any other industry — and with a strategy better executed through a unique level of industry-sector coordination cuts. Just prior to the Kuala Lumpur speech the IATA board reached the decision that, by 2020, the airline industry will achieve what they term carbon neutral growth, on the path to some then future point of net CO2 reductions.
What that means in practice is that the industry aims to somehow decouple an increase in emissions from the desire to grow passenger numbers. In explaining this decoupling, the IATA and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) provide the following illustrative schematic:
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Videoconferencing use is and will continue to grow in by people who would otherwise travel on business. This in part reflects corporate objectives of trying to contain travel spending. At the same time business travellers are finding that cutbacks in travel is having a harmful effect on managing existing relationships and projects overseas as well as an even more harmful effect on developing new business opportunities overseas and some companies are already relaxing travel policies which had been tightened significantly over the past 12 months. It is also likely that overtime more sophisticated online collaboration as permitted by microsoft tools will actually lead to increased business travel as a direct result of electronic collaboration by workers within individual countries and / or between workers in different countries.
Vidoconferencing is only one form of communicating that can reduce the need for business travel in the short term - but some of the more sophisticated technology which microsoft has developed will in all proability actually make the need to travel and meet each other more important as workers push the limits of online collaboration to its limits and need to understand the levels of each others capabilities at first hand.
Most often people think of video conference as a reference to a meeting as opposed to a conference. The typical meeting would last up to one business day. Conferences typically more than one day. Conferences should include any multi-day event such as corporate training - which I teach via web conferencing ! So the potential impact goes out even further. In multi-day events the attendees usually rent cars or ride public transportation back and forth from the hotel. Extend that out to inlclude additional "drive time" for dinner and entertainment.