OVERVIEW: eco.mio enables companies to achieve their climate goals while reducing costs. The software solution, which seamlessly integrates into any online booking tool, incentivises employees to book a greener travel option and allows companies to monitor the resulting carbon and cost savings through a performance dashboard. eco.mio determines the company-specific benchmark behaviour of each planned trip at the point of sale. Its algorithm considers the historical booking behaviour, pricing, and market availability as well as the company travel policy. The potential carbon and cost savings per booking option are presented as one easily understandable metric to the user. If a traveller spends less and saves on CO2, eco.mio translates the savings into a donation the company will dedicate to a climate project or the internal SAF program. Additionally, a peer comparison is displayed.
KEY FACTS: Founders: Katharina Riederer, Sarah Benarey, Mario Blatter
Launch date: Munich, 2021
Experience: former consultants & tech developers
Geographic reach: Global number of employees: five full-time and five part-time
CREDENTIALS: eco.mio’s CO2 footprint assessment is based on the atmosphair/VDR standard, both for flights and trains. This can be configured based on the customer’s CO2 calculation method. Historic client data is analysed and constantly enriched to accurately determine the company-wide travel behaviour and set a realistic footprint-reduction goal. The solution is OBT agnostic and integrated in Cytric, Onesto and Egencia.
PROPRIETARY PROPOSITION: eco.mio offers a browser extension that can be seamlessly integrated with a company’s existing online booking tool. The user input and the resulting market prices in combination with the historic travel data and company policy are used in an algorithm via an API to calculate the potential rewards for each travel option. Every successful booking is logged to an employee account and monitored via a company admin account.
TARGET MARKET: eco.mio targets companies with ambitious goals to reduce their CO2 emissions. Instead of enforcing stricter travel policies, eco.mio drives behavioural change within organisations and increases the attractiveness of companies to potential employees.
COMMERCIAL MODEL: The eco.mio solution works on a SaaS (software-as-a-service) basis. The pricing is a fixed fee per booking and is subject to the potential savings as well as the transaction volume of the company.
| BLACK BOX VERDICT: eco.mio is an excellent solution to tackle a corporate’s challenge of educating its travelling population and driving sustainable travel choices. It is incredibly easy to implement as a simple browser extension and also has the option of being more deeply embedded into the OBT. I particularly like the fact that the CO2 calculations can be configured at individual company level. Having accurate CO2 displayed at point of sale for travellers is a critical step forward in delivering more sustainable travel programmes. Reviewed by Paula Cullen, Black Box Partnerships |
