Guidelines for business travel and meetings

Last changed: 04 November 2024

As a world-class university and forward thinking employer, SLU must ensure research, education and environmental monitoring and assessment is of the highest quality, whilst guaranteeing the lowest climate impact possible.

Business travel and meetings are part of the university and an important tool for creating and maintaining contacts with the outside world, sharing research findings and initiating collaborations. However, business travel requires resources – both in terms of time and money. It may also impact the environment and climate negatively. The travel guidelines apply to all travel conducted by employees and non-employees at SLU’s expense.

Each employee must ensure they follow the guidelines and managers must follow up compliance. This way we can all make sure that the objectives are met and that SLU’s credibility as a world-class university for life and environmental sciences is maintained as outlined in SLU’s strategy for 2021 – 2025.

It needs to be easy to do things correctly

These guidelines have been designed to help you to make decisions on how to book business travel and meetings. Travel needs to be safe and cost-effective, and take the work environment, the balance between working and private life and the climate into consideration as far as possible. Before booking travel, it is important to evaluate whether it could be replaced by a virtual meeting as described in the flowchart in the business travel guidelines. 

If possible, trips should be booked 14 days in advance to take advantage of SLU travel agency discounts. Domestic travel should be by train. Occasionally, air travel may be acceptable if it saves a lot of time and the balance between the traveller’s personal life, working hours and work environment has been evaluated.

Facts:

Responsibility

All heads of department/managers are responsible for guideline compliance.

Objective

By 2025, SLU is to have reduced its total fossil fuel emissions from air travel by 60%, compared to 2019 per full-time equivalent. This could be the equivalent of a 90% reduction in domestic flights and 50% reduction in international flights.

Definitions

Staff: All job categories and people who are not employed, for example those with doctoral grants, temporary employees, and scholarship holders etc. who travel on behalf of a department.

Manager: Heads of department, collaborative centre supervisors, heads of division (or equivalent) within university administration and those delegated tasks from a head of department (provided these tasks involve responsibility for business travel).

Scope

The guidelines apply to everyone travelling at SLU’s expense, both employees and non-employees, regardless of how their positions are funded. The guidelines are mandatory, except in those cases where clear exemptions apply. Other regulations may be in place for travel as part of field work or similar.

All SLU employees must be able to justify their business travel. Suitable alternatives must always be explored, for example conducting video or telephone conferences.

Contact

For questions related to your travel and the online booking system, contact slu@stureplans.se.

For questions related to your travel invoice, contact ekonomi@stureplans.se.

For questions related to the environment and climate compensation, contact miljo@slu.se.

To update your authorisation to book travel on behalf of others, contact resor@slu.se.

For help with the online booking system, please read the FAQs and the manual in the online system under Services.