Alongside the departure time and airport, the cost of any added extras, and the class of travel, airline passengers in the UK will soon have something else to factor into their decision of what flight to book… the impact it will have on the environment.
In new guidance published by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), airlines and price comparison websites have been told to start displaying how much carbon individual flights will emit so that consumers can make an informed choice.
“Airlines providing understandable and comparable emissions data will enable passengers to make more informed travel decisions,” explained CAA director Tim Johnson after the new guidance was published on Thursday.
“We encourage all airlines and travel companies that advertise or sell flights in the UK which depart from or arrive at UK airports to follow this guidance.”
As Johnson explains, any airline or price comparison website that sells or advertises flights to British consumers departing or arriving at a UK airport will be expected to take “credible steps” to comply with the guidance by April 2027.
The CAA says it will monitor airline and price comparison websites throughout 2027, and if it thinks the industry hasn’t done enough to comply with the guidance, then it will move to a mandatory approach.
Some price comparison websites already display estimated carbon emissions against flight options, but the CAA’s new guidance provides detailed information on how this should be implemented:
- The calculation must be individually tailored to the flight that a consumer is interested in booking, taking into account aircraft type, flight distance, seat class, and expected load factors.
- It will be left to the airlines and price comparison websites to choose what calculation methodology they implement, but the CAA says standard units like kg CO2 or kg CO2e per passenger journey must be used.
- Retailers must also provide information on what methodology they use and, in an ideal world, the same calculation will be shown on an airline’s website as well as a price comparison site displaying the same flight.
- The CAA says it doesn’t want airlines to be creating their own calculation methods and should, instead, rely on one of four internationally recognized models.
The CAA says that many airlines and other stakeholder involved in the consultation process expressed their “strong support” for the guidance, although, perhaps unsurprisingly, some airlines baulked at the costs involved in updating their IT systems to show this information on their booking platforms.
Several airlines also, quite rightly, pointed out that operational changes like a last-minute aircraft swap to an older, less fuel-efficient aircraft would render the emissions data that someone could have relied on to book their flight useless.
Many of the stakeholders also admitted that displaying this data wouldn’t, in their opinion, do much to change booking behavior.
Back in 2019, low-cost airline Wizz Air claimed it was the “greenest airline in Europe” because its all-economy cabins on new Airbus A320-series meant it was operating with the lowest CO2 emissions per passenger.
Greenwashing regulations mean that those kinds of claims are a little harder to make nowadays, but Wizz Air chief executive József Váradi still boasts that his airline has “best emission indicators” of any airline in Europe and that “traditional airlines are on the wrong side of history in terms of sustainability.”
Váradi says that airlines that offer Business and First Class, that operate hub and spoke models, and that fly older or smaller planes, can’t be as sustainable as Wizz Air.
That being said, these airlines are offering consumers what they want, and you have to wonder whether a passenger looking for a premium experience will suddenly adopt a low-cost mindset so that they can reduce their carbon emissions.
