BA wages new class war on climate: fly or watch your business nosedive

Aviation industry is using the recession to frighten businesses into flying to keep clients instead of using videoconferencing
You could be forgiven for thinking the aviation industry was giving out mixed messages about climate change. Last week they announced that they would halve emissions by 2050, but as the targets rely on offsetting, the plan was described as a "huge get-out". Meanwhile, the industry is still planning to expand which would wipe out any planned efficiency savings anyway.
Then British Airways appeared to undo all their good work this week with a new luxury service and a business-class service called Face to Face. UK short-haul specialists FlyBe have also launched their Business is better face to face to wage war on the upsurge in videoconferencing in the name of saving the planet.
FlyBe spouts a host of dubious data on the importance of "in the flesh" meetings for building better business relationships and winning new clients and contracts.
They say, for example, that face to face meetings will turn 40% of potential customers into customers, compared with only 16% without face to face contact. But they fail to mention that this figure comes from an non-peer reviewed US study sponsored by two industry groups, the US Travel Association and the Destination and Travel Foundation. The latter's website says it exists to "bolster the destination marketing profession and travel industry".
What about the numbers though? Well the 40% figure comes from an online survey of 500 US business travellers and it doesn't specify what they were comparing face to face meetings with — sending an email perhaps? In any case, it begs the question how many customers you could rake in via videoconferencing while you are stuck at Heathrow check-in and squashed next to the fat bloke in row 56 of cattle class half way over the Atlantic.
And that's the point. Both campaigns ignore the fact that videoconferencing has come of age. Gone are the days of stuttering, pixellated images, out-of-synch audio and visuals — like a badly dubbed foreign film, and unreliable connections. Hyperspeed broadband and new technologies like HP's Halo and Skyroom allow such effectively intimate, eye to eye, literally across-the-table communications between participants it's hard to see what other advantages actually being physically in the same room might bring (what do you want to do? Smell your client?).
The airlines have also had some highprofile support from climate contrarians such as Boris Johnson, who recently popped over to New York in business class courtesy of BA to promote business travel. Though this might have been a clever strategy by BA to get back in the mayor's good books after refusing to upgrade him on a flight to Beijing for the Olympics last year, forcing poor old BoJo to fly cattle-class. And this is all before considering the disproportionate carbon impact that business class seats on planes have, as BA's latest luxury transatlantic service demonstrates.
The BA and FlyBe campaigns both deploy scare-mongering by playing on struggling businesses' anxiety during a world recession: that either their clients won't take them seriously, or their competitors will outflank them unless they rock up in person to a pitch or meeting. I wonder whether this is really the case. My personal experience would suggest otherwise.
I have "spoken" at conferences in the US by using the cost of my flight and hotel to pay for making a film of my speech and then doing Q&A via teleconference. I've also pitched for and won contracts in both Montreal, Canada and Inverness in Scotland via video-conference and on all these occasions the very fact I didn't fly not only reinforced my company's own environmental commitment and responsibility but also impressed the client and arguably gave us a competitive advantage.
Wider use of videoconferencing could generate truly dramatic carbon and financial savings, generating a robust business case for change. It's good for employee wellbeing too, putting an end to those red-eye/sleazyjet trips away from home, loved ones and the team back at base. I think intelligent, strategic use of videoconferencing over business travel full stop is an increasingly sensible and enlightened option, but over business aviation it is a no-brainer.
The FlyBe campaign aims to collect and collate people's stories of "video-conferencing disasters" and good news stories about why flying to that supposedly crucial meeting won new business.
I'd love to hear your experiences of positive video-conferencing benefits, or tales of when not making that dubious business trip by plane turned out to be a blessing in disguise!
• Ed Gillespie is a director at communications agency Futerra and has travelled the world without planes for his Slow Travel series