Saskia Griep has long been a pioneer in Responsible Tourism, always at the cutting edge of the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. She is now the Managing Director of Better Places, based in the Netherlands. In 2018, Better Places was the first travel organization in the Netherlands to seek and receive B Corp Certification, which is regarded by some as setting a high bar for environmental, social and governance (ESG) responsible businesses.
B Corp is a big 8,775 companies in 101 countries and covering 162 industries and over 800,000 workers. As they say on their website: “B Corp Certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials. In order to achieve certification, a company must:
- Demonstrate high social and environmental performance by achieving a B Impact Assessment score of 80 or above and passing our risk review. Multinational corporations must also meet baseline requirement standards.
- Make a legal commitment by changing their corporate governance structure to be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders, and achieve benefit corporation status if available in their jurisdiction.
- Exhibit transparency by allowing information about their performance measured against B Lab’s standards to be publicly available on their B Corp profile on B Lab’s website.
Certified B Corporations are leaders in the global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy. Unlike other certifications for businesses, B Lab is unique in our ability to measure a company’s entire social and environmental impact.”
These are bold claims: “Measuring a company’s entire social and environmental impact.”
A number of travel companies are certified “B Corps”: Audley Travel, True Travel and Intrepid to pick out just three. Take a look at their scores; there are headline scores and a separate scores for governance, workers, community, environment and customers. Simple. Too simple.
Saskia Griep and Better Places have decided to withdraw from B Corp certification for three reasons:
- “The (re)certification process is intensive, takes a long time and costs [the business] thousands of euros.”
- “even more important is the lack of transparency about how the scores are calculated. Although a company is assessed on five different themes, you ultimately receive the certificate based on the total number of points. So you can score below average on working conditions and climate impact and still collect sufficient points on the other themes.”
- “The main disadvantage is that there are no minimum requirements, for example for CO2 emissions, water and energy consumption, to qualify for the quality mark at all.”
Like other certifications, there is a lack of transparency. It remains to be seen how B Corps fare in the context of the EU’s CSRD and Green Claims Directives and growing consumer interest in actual performance.
As Better Places points out, “it is incomprehensible that there is no obligation to report on CO2 emissions in scope 3. For travel, this is the flight to and from a destination. While up to 90% of holiday emissions are caused by flights. The rest is negligible.”
Moreover, “there are B Corp travel organizations that work with exclusivity contracts. This means that a local partner may only work for them, while the travel organization may hire competing partners in the same region. If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it is how important it is that local entrepreneurs are independent and can work for multiple clients.”
Better Places reports that they have raised the concerns with B Corp and “They have not done anything with it yet.”
B Corp status is of questionable value for all businesses. as explained in Anjil Raval’s article in the Financial Times, in February 2023, on “The struggle for the soul of the B Corp movement.
I applaud Better Place’s decision to abandon B Corp certification and begin publishing an Impact Report and trip-specific impact scores. This empowers consumers to make effective choices.
