During my time as CTO at Weeva, a sustainability startup focused on impact reporting and data visualisation, it became clear that data remains the single biggest constraint to real sustainability progress in travel.
Weeva’s mission was to help businesses communicate their sustainability efforts. But over time, a consistent pattern emerged: the underlying data was fragmented, delayed, and often unverifiable. Even businesses committed to change lacked the infrastructure to make sustainability actionable – let alone measurable in real time.
This remains the industry’s central problem.
Reporting Is Not Management
Most organisations treat sustainability data as a compliance requirement. It is gathered quarterly or annually, primarily to meet disclosure standards or satisfy stakeholder expectations.
While ESG reporting platforms are now widespread, they do little to influence operational decisions. They look backward. They are decoupled from the data systems used to manage revenue, inventory, routing, or procurement.
Without operational alignment, sustainability remains reactive.
The travel sector won’t achieve net zero through reporting alone. Performance requires control — and control depends on timely, integrated data.
Sustainability Must Be Operationalised
In practice, this means organisations need the ability to:
-
Integrate financial, operational, and sustainability data
-
Monitor emissions, energy, water, and waste in near real time
-
Track Scope 3 supplier impacts with auditability
-
Automate regulatory reporting (CSRD, IFRS, SBTi, etc.)
Few travel businesses — outside the largest OTAs and hotel groups — have this capability. Data is siloed across platforms, business units, and suppliers. Manual processing introduces risk and delay.
The result is that sustainability actions are often disconnected from actual outcomes.
AILA: Making Data Infrastructure Practical
This is where AILA, DataArt’s AI Lake Accelerator, is relevant. It addresses the foundational gap: how to operationalise sustainability data quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale.
AILA is not another reporting tool. It is a deployable data lake architecture framework — built using AWS-native services — that consolidates sustainability and operational data into a single, governed environment. The entire setup can be delivered in under 60 days, vs what would have taken over a year previously.
It requires no proprietary software or ongoing licence costs. The business owns the environment, with full flexibility to extend it as needed.
In short, AILA makes mature data infrastructure accessible to mid-market travel organisations.
Shifting from Ambition to Execution
Net zero targets are everywhere, but few organisations can prove — with data — that they are on track. That is a credibility problem. It is also a risk.
Travellers are becoming more discerning. Investors are asking for detail. Regulators are no longer tolerating vague commitments. The reputational and commercial costs of doing nothing — or doing too little — are increasing.
Organisations that treat sustainability as a strategic operational discipline, underpinned by robust data, will be in a stronger position to compete.
I believe that with frameworks such as AILA, businesses can get far greater insight and super-charge their operational teams to understand sustainability in a more integrated, more operational way, and that will be the game changer to achieve the promised 2050 and 2030 targets we need, before its too late.
If you’d like to understand more, drop me an email or connect on Linkedin for a copy of DataArt’s latest sustainability PDF.
