Business travel is an important strategic lever for organizations of all kinds. Face-to-face meetings help secure new business, build teams, and show a commitment to existing customers, aiding with retention.

A business trip, however, entails far more than just getting on an airplane. And in today’s climate, this also means an organization needs to have a travel security program in place.

For the organization, asking people to leave their loved ones comes with moral and legal duty of care obligations. For the employee, taking on any business trip requires a level of trust that the organization takes their wellbeing and security seriously and has plans in place to mitigate or avoid risk.

Travel risk assessment — why you should do it and how to do it

The entire organization is responsible for travel risk management. The travel manager’s role is to spearhead the development and management of the duty of care policies and plans aimed at traveler security that also addresses their safety concerns. This requires two interrelated efforts: 1) creating those plans and 2) communicating this to business travel advice to travelers.

Egencia can help when it comes to travel risk assessment and mitigating high-risk travel.

Understanding travel risk tolerance and duty of care obligations

One of the travel manager’s first steps is to work with organizational stakeholders to understand the firm’s risk tolerance when it comes to business travel. Risk tolerance is more than weighing whether it’s a high risk to get on an airplane when a natural disaster like a hurricane is threatening a coastal zone.

As part of travel risk management, risk tolerance is a broader management concept. At a high level, it’s a framework for determining business travel risk assessment and how much risk is acceptable to achieve a desired outcome. For instance, entering an entirely new market is a riskier investment than incrementally advancing in a sector where you enjoy a strong established position. However, the upside reward could be substantial. How much risk are you willing to tolerate? Working through these issues and developing ways to mitigate the risk and amplify your strengths helps to create a strategy for making decisions. That includes deciding if the risk is too high and your time would be better spent focusing your efforts elsewhere.

Travel risk tolerance tailors this concept to corporate travel, creating a gauge for evaluating whether a trip should be taken. It also dovetails with an organization’s duty of care obligations. This tolerance gauge can vary between individual business travelers.

For instance, a higher-pollution region might pose a greater risk to someone with a respiratory condition than another employee. You can mitigate the risk by sending one employee versus another. It can also involve systemic issues such as monitoring areas that have experienced some civic unrest or other safety concerns. What conditions would constitute an acceptable risk of travel to that region? How are these considerations built into your corporate travel policy? These assessments need to include domestic and international travel and strike an appropriate balance between risk involved with business trips and business growth.

The definitive guide to prioritizing business traveler wellbeing

Traveler security policies use risk tolerance factors to understand, track and react to levels of risk in the world. Travel managers need to augment these policies with concrete plans for what to do in the event of an emergency to help their travelers stay safe.

Traveler communication

Against that backdrop, travel managers need to communicate these policies and procedures to travelers as the foundation of building the required trust that the organization stands behind the corporate travel security measures that are put in place. The first step in that communication is surveying your business travelers to understand their needs. Broad-based concerns and needs can be built into the travel risk management framework. Individualized concerns can become part of traveler profiles and data points when evaluating a specific business trip.

Travel managers should use all available means of communicating policies to employees. Interactive forums like presenting at staff meetings offer the opportunity to gather feedback, in addition to other one-way channels. In many cases, duty of care policy communication can be built into the booking tools so a traveler can be reminded of security policies and mitigation efforts within the context of an intended trip.

Egencia helps with duty of care at every step

Egencia brings extensive experience and resources in travel risk management that can help with setting risk tolerance frameworks and duty of care policies. Egencia can also help travel managers put traveler security guidelines into practice and keep travelers informed in real-time of events and developments around the world.

Our booking tools can flag business travelers for any non-compliant bookings and guide them to compliant choices. That interface can also communicate appropriate traveler security information about a destination or itinerary. Travel managers can set the company’s duty of care policies in one place and instantly apply them across every booking channel.

Once a trip is underway, Egencia can push alerts to travelers to keep them informed of events and relevant information that can impact their plans. In an emergency, travel managers can locate their travelers with our Traveler Tracker for all travel booked through Egencia. That view can extend 30 days into the past for a specific travel destination to assess any safety concerns that could cause potential traveler impact from a retroactive discovery such as a late-emerging public health issue in a region like coronavirus.