Collaboration & Co-Creation Innovation & Technology

Salesforce, JetBlue Accelerate Shared Journey Toward Sustainable Air Travel

Salesforce has joined JetBlue’s Sustainable Travel Partners program to accelerate sustainability of employee business travel; while JetBlue becomes the first airline to leverage Salesforce Net Zero Cloud to track emissions.

Published 2 years ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: Daniela Perez/Unsplash

Today, JetBlue and Salesforce announced an expansion of their partnership, leveraging travel data and technology to help enable a net-zero future for air travel.

As the first airline to utilize Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, JetBlue will gain comprehensive insights into its emissions on the path to achieve net zero across its full value chain. To further build on this collaboration, Salesforce is an inaugural customer of JetBlue’s newly launched Sustainable Travel Partners program — which includes a suite of offerings to help corporate travel customers reduce their business travel emissions and meet corporate sustainability targets.

To reduce its impact on the planet, Salesforce will also help compensate for its business travel emissions through the purchase of Sustainable Aviation Fuel certificates from JetBlue.

“The future of transformative climate action lies within the trusted customer-supplier relationship,” said Ari Alexander, VP and GM of Salesforce Net Zero Cloud. “We are thrilled that JetBlue is leveraging Salesforce Net Zero Cloud to prioritize data-driven climate action and proud to be a part of JetBlue’s Sustainable Travel Partners program to help accelerate the journey toward sustainable air travel.”

Salesforce helping JetBlue

Following the implementation of Net Zero Cloud, JetBlue will make travel emissions data available to the airline’s Sustainable Travel Partners.

“Accessing real-time, granular and insightful emissions data has historically been a pain point as we track and work toward our decarbonization targets,” said Sara Bogdan, Director of Sustainability and ESG at JetBlue. “We’re excited for Net Zero Cloud to not only help us strategize and plan for our own 2040 net-zero target, but to also help us share that data with our Sustainable Travel Partners — providing first-of-its-kind emissions reporting based on each corporate travelers’ actual JetBlue flights. As the world comes together to reduce our collective environmental impact, collaborations like these with Salesforce are vital as we share expertise in pursuit of shared goals.”

JetBlue helping Salesforce

JetBlue’s Sustainable Travel Partners program will provide Salesforce with personalized, company-specific emissions data and actionable insights to help drive employee engagement, education, and behavior change at scale. This builds upon Salesforce’s current efforts, which include an optimized employee-travel booking tool that recommends lowest-emission modes of travel.

As part of its Climate Action Plan, Salesforce has also set a goal of maintaining employee business travel emissions intensity below 50 percent of its FY20 baseline. As a Sustainable Travel Partner program member, Salesforce worked toward this goal by sourcing 325,000 gallons of SAF in 2021.

Sustainable air travel in the near future?

SAF has gotten quite the boost in the past few months, with several big industry moves aiming to help stimulate a market for lower carbon-emitting fuel alternatives to traditional jet fuel: In September, the industry trade group Airlines for America — of which JetBlue is a member, pledged to work with government leaders and other stakeholders to produce three billion gallons of cost-competitive Sustainable Aviation Fuel in 2030. At COP26 in November, JetBlue, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines and Amazon Air joined Salesforce as members of the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance— adding to the Alliance’s purchasing power to stimulate the scaling of supply chains for alternative fuels and to encourage policy support. And just last month, Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund became a principal investor in LanzaJet’s (and the world's) first alcohol-to-jet SAF production plant — a win-win partnership that will enable LanzaJet to bring lower-cost, sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel to the global market, and bring Microsoft closer to its 2030 goal of becoming carbon negative and advancing a net-zero economy.