How Navan helps Lime on the road to net-zero emissions

Lime — a shared, micro-mobility company headquartered in San Francisco — operates fleets of electric scooters and e-bikes across 280 cities in 30 countries. The company is on a mission to build a future where transportation is shared, affordable, and carbon-free. In 2020, when Lime’s leadership set the ambitious target of a net-zero carbon footprint by 2030, they knew they’d have to look everywhere for carbon savings, including cutting emissions. That’s when they found Navan.

Challenges Lime faced before Navan

Before partnering with Navan, Lime’s corporate travel was unmanaged. The hundreds of employees who travelled — to establish new markets, meet city leaders, and get together as a team — were responsible for booking their travel independently and submitting expenses after returning home.

The lack of centralised management made tracking and managing the company’s business travel emissions challenging.

While employee travel constituted a significant portion of Lime’s operations, the company lacked a comprehensive solution to monitor and reduce its carbon impact.

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"The sustainability tools and features were an attractive benefit in Lime’s decision to partner with Navan as its corporate travel solution."

Andrew Savage

VP, Head of Sustainability

Why Lime chose Navan

Navan’s sustainability features and tools influenced Lime’s decision to move away from unmanaged travel and adopt Navan as its first corporate travel management partner. Navan’s commitment to sustainability and cutting-edge features aligned with Lime’s goals of reducing carbon emissions across its operations. 

Additionally, Lime created travel policies that resulted in time and monetary savings — to the tune of £2.1 million since switching to Navan. By implementing more granular travel policies, such as booking economy class and mandating rail travel where equivalent routes are available, Lime was able to make cost savings as well as carbon savings.

Before Navan, nearly 1,000 Lime employees booked travel with zero insight into their environmental impact. Now, they have real-time, actionable visibility into how their travel impacts the environment and can better understand the company’s efforts to reach net-zero emissions.

Dialling into the data

Navan’s comprehensive suite of sustainability tools — designed to track, measure, and reduce carbon emissions — equips customers like Lime with the tools needed to make informed decisions.

Those tools are displayed in Navan’s CO2 dashboard, which provides Lime leaders with real-time visibility and actionable insights backed by granular data. These insights enable organisations to pinpoint where carbon emissions occur, including passenger names, departments, airports, booking dates, travel dates, regions, and cabin classes.

With this detailed insight, Lime can prioritise areas to reduce carbon emissions and develop accurate emissions budgets. This data seamlessly integrates into existing systems via Navan’s API.

“Over the past six months, we have delved deeper and more frequently into Navan’s sustainability data. We’re considering how to leverage the data and adjust our policies for the future,” said Rinck Buisman, Lime’s Senior Manager of Global Procurement, who is based in Amsterdam.

As Lime grows, its team members are travelling more frequently, and often come together for in-person offsites. Savage looks forward to the day when they can leverage technology to find the most sustainable location for a group offsite, taking into account travel details like who, where, and when.

The Navan effect: empowering individuals

Awareness is the first step toward change, and displaying carbon emissions during booking helps travellers make better choices. Emissions are integrated into Navan’s booking experience, with carbon emissions displayed next to each flight option.

“The most influential data point we see right now is the carbon metric next to the purchase price and itinerary,” said Savage. “We’re eager to work with Navan to enhance this feature further and simultaneously add tools like rewards for carbon and cost savings.”

Navan also gives individual users transparent visibility into their CO2 emissions, including detailed breakdowns by transportation mode and historical data. This information empowers Lime’s employees to make more informed travel decisions and understand the environmental impact of their choices, which fosters a culture of sustainability within the company.

The Rail Alternative Pop-up is also instrumental in raising employees’ awareness of the impact of their travel. It informs travellers searching for a flight when there is a rail route for journeys less than 650 kilometres / 400 miles, potentially representing a lower-emission travel option.

“The most influential feature that’s helped us shift employee awareness around sustainability is the Rail Alternative Pop-up, especially among our European colleagues. It is a concrete tool and prompt within our platform that we ensure employees are aware of,” said Savage.

A brighter future for all

Thanks to Navan’s tools and real-time data, Lime successfully found a corporate travel partner that helps it track, reduce, and proactively address the environmental impact of its travel on an individual and organisational level. 

Lime leaders intend to leverage the Navan platform to incentivise employees to make more sustainable choices in the future.

“Navan’s loyalty programme played a role in our choice of Navan, so we could eventually offer incentives around sustainability right alongside cost, because the two go hand-in-hand for us at Lime,” said Savage.

Lime’s commitment to sustainability across the business is paying off — the company’s 2023 carbon inventory report found Lime cut emissions intensity from its 2019 baseline by 59.5%. In 2023 alone, it cut emissions by more than 16% year-over-year even while growing its larger business by more than +32% in the same period. Travel will continue to operate alongside Lime’s ambitious path to net zero.

As Navan continues to swiftly meet its customers’ sustainability demands, the future holds promising avenues for environmentally conscious customers such as Lime. With Navan leading the charge, innovative solutions will help enable the further reduction of carbon emissions without compromising the high quality of business travel experiences.