Corporate travel safety 2024

Guides

The role of duty of care

How smooth travel and duty of care shape employee experience

Risk management vs duty of care

Risks to consider

Travel safety processes

Set up safety guidelines for international travel and safeguard employees with TravelPerk

Corporate travel safety and security: a short guide

Your employee is halfway across the world on a business trip. Everything’s going smoothly—until it’s not. Whether it’s a missed flight, a lost company card or something more serious, like civil unrest, you need to know your team is prepared and safe.

The reality is that while most trips go off without a hitch, it only takes one incident to highlight the importance of a solid safety policy. It’s about preparing people for the unexpected, ensuring they know who to contact in an emergency and making sure they’re covered with travel insurance.

In this guide, we show you how to create a travel safety plan that’s clear, practical and easy for your team to follow. You’ll have a strategy that keeps your employees safe and gives you peace of mind, knowing your business is ready for anything.

The role of duty of care in business travel

A company’s legal and moral responsibility to take care of their employees when they travel on behalf of their company is known as its ‘duty of care’. In practice, duty of care involves identifying potential risks, such as health concerns, security threats or unexpected disruptions, and taking steps to mitigate them.

Duty of care policies are now a must as part of a company's general travel policy.

Companies need to conduct thorough risk assessments before any trip, considering factors like local safety concerns, civil unrest and natural disasters that might impact the journey.

Providing employees with the right tools like travel insurance, emergency contact information and real-time updates on travel disruptions is also important. Emergency preparedness is another critical aspect of duty of care.

Companies should have clear plans for emergencies, ensuring that employees know where to find local emergency services, how to contact their embassy and what to do if they need to evacuate.

Not only does having a duty of care travel policy help avoid problems, it actually improves the way employees feel about the company. There are a number of benefits experienced by employers who look after their travellers well.

How smooth travel and duty of care shape employee experience

A trip that is as smooth and pain-free as possible means a more productive one. This equals a happier employee. Not only can this help with staff retention, but more importantly, it lessens the possibility of legal implications further down the line.

Corporate travel safety, and duty of care policies specifically, are areas that all travel managers, admins or HR teams should be familiar with. For professionals in these areas looking to improve employee care and take the initiative, a rethink or creation of a duty of care policy would be a great starting point.

In fact, most good corporate travel companies now include duty of care services as part of their solution.

At TravelPerk, we prioritise your employees' safety throughout their journey. With our Duty of Care feature, you’ll receive real-time updates on travel restrictions, local safety risks and required documentation before and during trips. From pre-departure alerts to emergency assistance, TravelCare equips your team with everything they need to travel safely and confidently. Stay informed and compliant, and protect your employees every step of the way.

Travel risk management vs duty of care: what’s the difference?

Duty of care is the "why"—the responsibility to keep employees safe—while travel risk management is the "how"—the strategy that fulfils that responsibility.

For example, providing travel insurance, access to emergency contacts and real-time notifications are all part of a travel risk management strategy that fulfils the company’s duty of care.

The terms ‘duty of care’ and ‘travel risk management’ are often used interchangeably, which is incorrect. The difference lies in what companies need to do in order to ensure the safety of their employees versus how they’re going to do it.

What are some safety risks to consider while travelling for work?

If your employees often travel to different parts of the world, here are some potential risks you might consider:

Political instability

Travelling to regions with political unrest can be dangerous. Protests, strikes or conflicts can disrupt travel plans and put employees in harm's way. Before approving travel, check reliable sources like government travel advisories to assess the political climate.

Make sure your employees know what to do if they encounter a protest or if the situation escalates—like how to stay safe, avoid trouble spots and find emergency contacts if needed.

Use government resources like the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) or the U.S. Department of State’s travel advisories, which provide up-to-date information on safety and security, including the terrorism threat level and recommendations for travellers.

Sanitation and health

According to IMG's Annual Travel Outlook Survey for 2024, 67% of respondents indicated that having travel medical insurance is "very important" when travelling internationally.

While you often can’t predict health issues, you can plan how to manage them in advance. There are a number of health-related considerations to be aware of while travelling, including:

The availability of healthcare: make sure your travellers know where they can get medical support before they need it. Encourage employees to research the availability of local healthcare services and keep a list of nearby hospitals or clinics.

Food and water safety: while working abroad is a great way to gain new experiences and perhaps taste new food and drink, it’s worth remembering that some parts of the world might not have the same hygiene standards as at home. Travellers can reduce their risk of stomach upsets by sticking to safe eating and drinking habits. Although tempting, travellers should steer clear of street food. Similarly, opt for bottled water instead of tap water.

Health threats and diseases: travellers will need to complete any necessary vaccination courses for the country prior to travelling.

Fortunately, not all duty of care concerns life or death circumstances. Employers may also want to consider their travellers’ overall health and wellness. To mitigate this, a company’s duty of care obligations should incorporate wellbeing practices—for example, looking for hotels that offer fitness hubs or healthy menus.

Accommodation security

When your employees settle into a hotel after a long day of travel, safety should still be top of mind. Hotel rooms and other accommodations can be prime targets for theft and other security issues. Here are a few key business travel safety tips:

Choose secure hotel rooms. Prioritise accommodations with strong security measures like 24-hour front desk service, security cameras in common areas and digital room keys. Ensure the hotel is in a safe neighbourhood by researching the area beforehand with Google Street View and reading guest reviews.

Avoid ground-floor rooms. Rooms on the ground floor are more accessible to intruders. It’s safer to book rooms on higher floors, ideally between the third and sixth floors, where they are less vulnerable to break-ins but still reachable by emergency services.

Be discreet at check-in. Encourage employees to be discreet when checking in. They should avoid sharing personal details out loud, such as their room number, and request that the front desk write down the information instead. This prevents potential eavesdroppers from targeting them.

Use the hotel room’s safety features. Ensure that employees use the in-room safe to store valuables like passports, laptops and credit cards. Plus, they should always lock the door using the deadbolt and consider bringing a portable door lock or rubber door stop for added security.

Know the emergency exits. Upon arrival, employees should immediately locate the nearest emergency exits and familiarise themselves with the escape routes. This quick action can be critical in an emergency.

Third-party contractors

A company’s duty-of-care obligations should not only cover its employees, they also extend to third-party contractors and other people the organisation has responsibilities towards. A third-party contractor can pose new risk elements, will they expose travelling staff to security risks?

It is recommended to either use only trusted parties from an approved list or conduct thorough audits of third parties, especially those overseas.

Female traveller safety

While safety is paramount for anyone on the road, female business travellers are more likely to face risks than their male counterparts A 2023 survey by World Travel Protection found that 71% of female business travellers say travelling for work as a woman is less safe than travelling for work as a man.

The same report found that 19% of female business travellers said their employers should “act with women’s safety in mind,” including ensuring flights don’t arrive late at night.

In spite of this, only 18% of travel policies specifically address female safety. It can be a delicate issue for businesses, but in order to properly uphold their duty of care requirements, they need to ensure that female employees are alert to the unique challenges they may encounter while travelling for work.

4 Steps to promote traveller safety

While the risks associated with business travel can vary widely depending on the destination, the steps you take to prepare and support your travellers can make all the difference

1. Travel risk assessment

When planning any business travel, you should perform a travel risk assessment to ensure you are aware of any specific threats travellers may encounter during their trip. Start off by doing this for your biggest travel markets.

By nature, travel risks are constantly changing. In any one country, they vary by the time of year, the current political climate and more.

This means that it’s important to carry out some extra research every time you send your employees on a business trip, to make sure you haven’t missed any risks that weren’t there the last time you checked.

Want to improve travel safety for your employees? Read our article on conducting a travel security risk assessment for expert insights.

2. Employee itinerary tracking

Knowing exactly where your employees are during business trips is essential for their safety and smooth travel management. If an emergency or disruption occurs—like a flight cancellation or security risk—having real-time updates means you can act fast, reducing confusion and stress.

With TravelPerk’s corporate travel tracker, you can view all employee itineraries in one place–on a single screen–down to the specifics like flights, hotel bookings and car rentals. For larger teams or organisations, the grouping feature allows you to organise employees by team or location, for easy management.

TravelPerk also keeps everyone informed on the go with mobile alerts, delivering important updates directly to smartphones. The built-in travel tracker offers full visibility into business trips and compliance with company travel policies, reducing risks and ensuring corporate standards are met.

3. Employee training

Once you’ve assessed all the risks, it’s time to pass some of that knowledge on to your employees. While you cannot foresee incidents and accidents, you can train your staff to spot what is and isn't an unacceptable risk to take while on a business trip.

Discuss all the major risks and common threats that you or your staff members may encounter. Training should focus primarily on prevention as it's often easier to avoid a dangerous situation than resolve it. However, educating people on how to respond will also aid competency.

Remember, in the moment there’s often not enough time to think, so make sure your travellers really take on board your advice—even if it’s something as simple as looking out for pickpockets.

Receiving the right education and training can save the life of a traveller in a critical situation. Travellers can easily get in trouble because they’re not familiar with the culture, rules or laws of the country they’re visiting. Make sure you give them a crash course on these risks and they’ll have a better chance at avoiding them.

4. It's not usually life and death

Most incidents that occur on business trips are not life-threatening, they can result in inconveniences such as having a phone stolen or getting sick from poor hygiene in the region. Apart from the obvious stress for travellers, these small incidents add up to lost workdays, wasted business trips and unhappy employees.

Corporate travel safety is not just a process of avoiding legal action against an employer after a mishap on a work trip, it's about making those expensive flights and hotels as effective as possible by ensuring staff are operating at their peak and focusing on the job at hand.

Set up safety guidelines for international travel and safeguard employees with TravelPerk

Without a strong focus on traveller safety, your business risks more than just inconveniences—you're exposing your team to serious dangers that can lead to costly disruptions, legal liabilities and damage to your company’s reputation. The solution? TravelPerk’s end-to-end duty of care solution.

With TravelPerk, you can track your employees in real-time using a traveller map. Plus, 24/7 customer support with a 15-second target response time via app, email or phone means help is always immediately available in any emergency or when urgent trip changes or support is needed.

Putting your travelers safety first. Learn how today.

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Corporate travel safety 2024

Corporate travel safety and security: a short guide

The role of duty of care in business travel

How smooth travel and duty of care shape employee experience

Travel risk management vs duty of care: what’s the difference?

What are some safety risks to consider while travelling for work?

Political instability

Sanitation and health

Accommodation security

Third-party contractors

Female traveller safety

4 Steps to promote traveller safety

1. Travel risk assessment

2. Employee itinerary tracking

3. Employee training

4. It's not usually life and death

Set up safety guidelines for international travel and safeguard employees with TravelPerk

Putting your travelers safety first. Learn how today.

Make business travel simpler. Forever.

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