Providing the travel support your employees need, when they need it

It’s good that you know where all your employees are when on business trips. It’s good that you can identify and even predict the risks they face. But what good does any of it do if you can’t reach them?

It’s like watching an event unfold on the news, knowing that if you can’t talk to the people involved, there’s nothing you can do to get them out.

Do you have the communication infrastructure to contact every traveler—or just a bunch of old cellphone numbers?

As you consider the likelihood of having to extract an employee from a third-world country experiencing a political coup (or from an airport where all the pilots have gone on strike), ask yourself this:

• Can you deliver automatic, pre-trip information to make sure your travelers are as prepared as possible?
• Can you reach employees using multiple channels (email, phone, etc.)?
• Do you have two-way communication with travelers, so you can confirm their safety and share information?
• Do you have the travel program, staff and expertise to actually assist employees in need?
• Can you track all that communication, keeping tabs on who you’ve reached and who still needs attention?
• Can you do it all quickly? If an emergency situation arises, can you reach and ensure your employees’ safety in 60 minutes or less?

This level of communication might seem like overkill, but consider how difficult it can be to reach a friend or family member on any given day, let alone an employee caught in crisis halfway around the world. Even contacting traveling employees in the United States when they visit different states can be difficult if the company's travel policy is not up to scratch.

70% of businesses are improving communication to reduce travel risk. What have you got in the works?

Companies have a lot on their plates this year, but according to a 2017 Business Travel Show survey, a lot of them plan to beef up their ability to communicate with business travelers. Perhaps that’s because 43% of them say their greatest challenge in mitigating travel risk is effective communication.

If your communication infrastructure isn’t up to the task, you’re not keeping up with your duty of care.

Say what you will, it’s time to act.

Duty of care isn’t merely a part of your workday, it’s a critical part of your employees’ lives and livelihoods. It is essential that you have the infrastructure and travel policy to maintain it—so you can respond as quickly as an emergency occurs.

Put an infrastructure in place that will:

1. Capture complete, accurate and real-time traveler itineraries.
2. Combine that information with third-party risk-assessment data.
3. Support it all with the ability to monitor and communicate with every traveler.
4. Monitors employee safety when those typically responsible for duty of care are not available.

Read more: Using data to track down your travelers

Read more: Managing traveler risk in a world of uncertainty