‘Sustainable travel costs more and isn’t practical.’ It’s one of the most common objections event teams raise once the conversation turns to emissions, and it rarely comes from bad faith. Budgets are tight, itineraries are fixed months in advance, and swapping a flight for a train can look like friction rather than a genuine option. But cost and practicality are exactly where this excuse falls apart once you look at where event travel emissions actually sit, and how little of that picture most events currently capture.
The reality behind the excuse
Realistic, lower-cost alternatives already exist: incentivise rail over flights, choose closer or better-connected venues, consolidate trips instead of running separate ones, and weigh up hybrid formats where the event allows it. Here, budget isn’t the issue, but it does require different decisions to be made.
The bigger issue is visibility. Travel is usually the largest single share of an event’s carbon footprint, and it’s also the least captured. Only around 43% of events record audience travel data (according to TRACE data), which means most organisers arguing travel ‘isn’t practical’ to change are doing so without knowing where their own travel emissions sit. That’s a measurement gap, and it’s where the biggest, most defensible wins tend to show up once it’s closed.
What this looks like in practice
You don’t need to overhaul your event’s travel policy to make a dent. A few practical, proportionate moves:
- Incentivise rail on shorter routes: Flights account for 77% of total travel emissions from just 1.6% of journeys. That’s a small share of trips doing most of the damage, which means targeting flight-heavy routes first delivers more than a blanket policy change. Look at your most popular routes and research alternatives where rail is viable (using your data from travel measurement).
- Choose closer or better-connected venues: Venue location sets the travel pattern for everyone attending. A well-connected venue does more to cut emissions before the event starts than any behaviour change afterwards, making public transport the easy option & reducing the need for private transport.
- Consolidate pre event trips: Combining site visits, supplier meetings and staff travel into fewer journeys reduces both emissions and cost, without asking anyone to travel less for the event itself.
- Weigh up hybrid where the format allows: Not every event suits it, but where it does, hybrid removes travel from the equation entirely for the people who opt in and allows you to reach a wider audience.
- Default staff to public transport: Staff already travel by public transport more than attendees do, 69% compared with 52%. Building that into policy closes some of the remaining gap.
- Reframe travel as part of the event: The agency Evolve Events has piloted overland routes as a deliberate part of the delegate experience, providing interesting activities and stop-offs as part of the journey and opening up destinations that aren’t reachable by air, as well as putting more spend into the local economy along the way. It’s a reminder that ‘isn’t practical’ is often a framing problem as much as a logistics one.
The business case for taking it seriously
None of this is about telling people to travel less for its own sake. It’s about the fact that travel decisions currently being made without data are also being made without a clear read on cost.
Rail isn’t automatically more expensive than flying once you factor in the ancillary costs of air travel: transfer time and cost and waiting time.
Modest shifts compound. Based on TRACE data, moving just 10% of audience trips from cars to public transport could save 350.8 tCO2e, roughly the annual laundry emissions of 2,800 households. That’s one lever, on one mode of transport, moved slightly.
The practical next step is simply measuring travel on your next event, so you can see the actual split between flights, rail, car and public transport before you decide where to intervene. Once that picture exists, the ‘costs more, isn’t practical’ argument has somewhere concrete to be tested, and usually doesn’t hold up.
Find 30 other myth-busted sustainability excuses here.
TRACE captures travel data alongside the rest of your event’s footprint, so you’re working from what actually happened rather than an estimate. Book a demo to see how it works.
