Interview: Denis Fontes, travel manager, International Olympic Committee

One travel professional guaranteed a busy 2024 is International Olympic Committee travel manager Denis Fontes. The XXXIII Summer Olympics take place in Paris from 26 July-11 August and Fontes is responsible for ensuring the safe delivery of around 1,000 IOC employees, members, advisers and guests to a destination being accessed as well by nearly 140,000 athletes and national Olympic committee members, and hundreds of thousands of spectators.

This year is also significant for Fontes in a very different way. The IOC has set a target of reducing its travel-related carbon emissions by 30 per cent in 2024 and 50 per cent in 2030. Those figures are compared with an annual average of emissions for 2016-2019 (to reflect the four-year Games cycle), including routine individual business travel for which Fontes is also responsible.

“Sustainability is one of the main pillars of Olympic Agenda 2020+5, a strategic roadmap of 15 main recommendations fashioned by the IOC,” says Fontes. “That is why we established objectives to reduce our carbon footprint related to travel.”

“We are really well on track for the 2024 target,” says Fontes. Several different initiatives have contributed to the success of the strategy, but for Fontes the most important was the introduction in September 2022 of carbon budgets. “By budgeting you establish a forecast, you implement, you control and you monitor to maximise your chances of reaching that objective,” he says.

Each IOC department sets both a financial and CO2 annual budget in a consolidated Excel document. This is achieved by predicting which destinations will be visited during the year and how many trips will be made to each of those destinations, with an automatic price and CO2 forecast generated for every anticipated trip.

“Each department knows it has those two targets to respect once we have the budgets submitted, reviewed and approved,” Fontes says. “At time of booking, our travel management company shares CO2 consumption for the trip as well as the price, so travellers can choose.”

Along with the budgets, booked data is loaded into Power BI, a Microsoft data visualisation tool. As a result, says Fontes, “Management can consult their CO2 consumption and where they stand compared with the target that has been provided.

“It works really well. It helps us act if required to make sure we reach the target. Until now the targets have been reached or, if they weren’t, there were explanations behind it, for example geopolitical challenges that require more travel because you need to sort out a situation that wasn’t foreseen. But until now we have been able to compensate from other departments because the most important thing is to reduce the overall emissions for the organisation. If we faced a situation where there was no valid explanation then of course we would take necessary action.”

Asked if he would recommend carbon budgets to other travel managers, Fontes says: “If you have the support from senior management to reduce your carbon footprint, you can do it. A carbon budget will definitely help you forecast and control your travel activities.”

To make the strategy work, however, he adds: “You need to make sure you have set up your reporting platform really well. The first issue I would think about is my account numbers, different departments, reporting filters and cost centres. How will I create my reporting structure?”

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Fontes is pulling other important levers to achieve travel emissions reduction. The IOC has rewritten its travel policy, for example to mandate train instead of plane on appropriate shorter journeys. The organisation has also introduced what it calls Smart Travel Principles.

“Those are things you need to think about before a trip is approved,” says Fontes. “We have inserted into our online booking tool four questions that employees need to consider to justify the trip. What is the value added of your trip versus a virtual meeting? What about the duration on-site – is it less than the time of travel? Are you combining several meetings within the same trip? And are you optimising the number of people you are sending?

“The Smart Travel Principles don’t prevent you from booking but your line manager has to have the common good sense to approve a trip that is valid.”

Meanwhile, Fontes is poised to start the intensive phase of arranging trips for the Paris Olympics. As travel manager he sits in the IOC’s corporate events and services department alongside other managers responsible for accommodation, ground transportation, event management and logistics. Hotels and other forms of accommodation were negotiated in many cases years in advance but while Fontes prepared his strategy some time ago, travel booking is not generally possible until around six months ahead.

“Each edition of the Games is very different,” he says. “You can’t compare Rio with Beijing, Tokyo and now what will come with Paris. One of the main challenges for us is always to guarantee we have enough seats to make sure that all our needs are covered.”

Air charter is largely avoided for three reasons: sustainability, risk management (minimising the number of IOC people on the same flight) and because IOC personnel usually need to travel at different times.

“We need to be really creative,” says Fontes. As an example, Paris is fortunate in enjoying excellent rail links, but trains are generally only bookable a couple of months ahead. Fontes is in talks with operators about potential solutions to this problem.

Never was the objective of getting the right people to the right place at the right time challenged more than when Fontes had to organise travel for the delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics in July-August 2021 followed closely by the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022, with both events severely affected by Covid restrictions on travel.

Tokyo, Fontes says, was tough enough but “China was even more complicated because the country was closed. There were only very limited flights, subject to government approval. We were only a few months from the opening ceremony with no flight operations in place.”

Covid counter-measures were also extremely strict. “We had a team taking care of performing Covid tests to make sure travellers were negative when they left home for the airport,” he says. Dedicated counters had to be provided at airports and there was even use made of transit space off limits to the public, including exclusive use of a terminal at Paris Charles de Gaulle.

The pressure to deliver is intense, but Fontes, a keen sportsman himself, would have it no other way. “It’s a job driven by passion,” he says. “It is a mission where you are working days and nights, you are tired, and there are geopolitical challenges you could not foresee which wipe out much of what you were planning for three months.

“But the Olympics send a message of peace for the globe and that gives you the motivation. You need to create a solution to get everyone to that opening ceremony because there are athletes who work for years to make their dreams come true by being there.

“I am thinking also about the refugee team, which is something amazing. It is composed of athletes who have a chance to compete at the Olympics independently of the situation in their country of origin. When you see those athletes competing and you know you contributed, it’s a great thing.”