Viking Line’s latest sustainability innovation, the Green Sea Conference, is said to reduce GHG gas emissions from a conference trip by an average of 90% and satisfy the desires of environmentally conscious corporate customers.
According to Viking Line, each year about 600,000 passengers travel with groups or conferences on its vessels, and all aspects involved in a sea conference have now been subject to a comprehensive sustainability assessment. The company says that conferences at sea have regained their previous popularity after the Covid pandemic. For 2024, Viking Line’s conference capacity on its Helsinki route is being further expanded. Sea conferences on Viking Line’s vessels are usually arranged for groups with fewer than 30 people, but meetings for 300–500 people are also held frequently. Sometimes major sea seminars can host up to 1000 participants.
Viking Line is now launching Green Sea Conferences, a new sustainable alternative for conference planners. GHG emissions per participant are on average 90% lower for a Green Sea Conference than for the normal conference product. Green Sea Conferences are offered on all departures on the two climate-smart vessels, Viking Glory and Viking Grace, in service on the Turku route.
Philip Sjöstrand, Head of Sales Viking Linesaid: “Our customers choose sea conferences above all to combine work and pleasure in a cost-effective way, keep the group together and at the same time meet people’s need for physical meetings, a need that has become stronger in recent years. With our new conference product, we can provide all this in such a way that the carbon footprint of their conference trip is small.”
Marika Immonen, Head of Customer Experience Viking Line said: “Emissions from a Green Sea Conference are lower because customers who have opted for such a journey travel using renewable biofuel. We have also carried out a detailed sustainability assessment of the other components that are part of a conference trip. Each year more than 19,000 group and conference events with a total of some 600,000 participants are held on our vessels. This means every choice that increases sustainability makes a big difference.”
Viking Line Sustainability Manager Dani Lindberg concluded: “Each year, companies set increasingly ambitious sustainability goals, and it has also become more and more important to employees that their employer’s business is sustainable. By choosing a Green Sea Conference, such conference planners are pioneers and can be certain that the emissions from their conference have been minimised. As early as last summer, we started giving our leisure travellers the option of choosing biofuel.”
Image: Viking Line vessel (source: Viking Line)
