EY

Company name: EY
Industry: Professional services
Headquarters: London
Employees globally: 395,000 globally of which around 150,000 are active travellers
Footprint: Offices in more than 150 countries 
Global revenue: €45.62 billion (FY23)
European T&E spend: €250 million, around €50 million of which was spent on air travel (2022). BTN Europe estimates its European T&E spend rose to approximately €275 million in 2023.
Global T&E spend: €1.07 billion (2002). BTN Europe estimates its global T&E spend rose to approximately €1.16 billion in 2023.
Primary TMC partner: American Express Global Business Travel 
Primary booking tool: Concur 
Primary travel risk management provider: International SOS 
Primary payment provider: American Express
Travel programme insights: Around a third of EY’s travel is for internal purposes and the company does not expect to return to overall pre-pandemic volumes. Many of its most recent innovations have centred around reducing the environmental impact of its business travel activity (see below) but of note elsewhere was the 2022 pilot and 2023 roll-out of a blockchain-based portal that enabled employees to book leisure trips. It worked with blockchain specialist Winding Tree and two major US airlines on the platform. “We are trying to offer more to our employees around talent retention and attraction, so we took it upon ourselves to see how we could use this technology in the leisure space and bring something different to employees,” said EY’s then global innovation and technology leader Ian Spearing who wrote a guest column for BTN Europe last year.
Sustainability targets: EY has committed to achieving net zero by 2025 and reducing absolute emissions by 40 per cent across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2025 compared to 2019. 
Travel-related sustainability actions: EY has taken significant steps to reduce the environmental impact of its travel activity, notably changing its policy to eliminate one-day trips, encouraging travellers off planes and on to trains, and launching in collaboration with IBM a Sustainable Travel Approval Tool (STAT) in more than 40 countries that is designed to question the necessity of travel. Since launching STAT, rail bookings have increased to 22 per cent of all travel bookings, compared with 10 per cent in 2019. The company has also implemented carbon budgets and last summer launched a combined air and rail RFP in which it identified 250 city pairs globally where it believed rail options could compete with air. EY was Highly Commended in the Achievement in Sustainability – Managed Travel Programme category at the BTN Group’s inaugural Business Travel Sustainability Awards Europe in 2023. 
Sustainability reporting: According to its 2023 annual report, EY has reduced business travel emissions by 59 per cent compared to its 2019 baseline. Its emissions from business travel in FY23 were 395,000 tCO2e, around half of its overall FY23 emissions (777,000 tCO2e), and were down from 952,000 tCO2e in FY19 when business travel contributed 70 per cent of EY’s overall emissions.