Ten Scary Travel Risk Questions Which Help Determine if You Need to Look at Travel Risk Mitigation.

The insurance industry provides coverage for when things go wrong. With a volume of travelers on the road, things can go wrong for the traveler and the company with impacts felt in many ways. From medical emergencies and accidents, to weather events, plane crashes, or even terrorism, companies should be prepared and most are not. If you don’t know if you need this and do not know what to ask yourself, you are not alone. Please take these questions to your executive team – to include legal and HR - and see what they feel most uncomfortable about and then ask for help. From your overall insurance provider to specific travel risk mitigation companies, there are tools and solutions.

1. Have you ever had to find and support travelers after an event like a plane going down, an earthquake, terrorism, or catastrophic weather event - or could you realistically have to?
2. Do you offer any pre-trip intel and alerts to your employees/travelers today? If yes, how, with whom, and are you comfortable with the reliability of this data and frequency?
3. How do you track all travelers and assets, and do you rely on others to communicate on the company’s behalf to travelers already on a trip or in route to a destination?
4. Do you have travelers being sent into high risk locations that you believe are not prepared for travel? Do you have a way to determine which places are high risk?
5. Would you claim you have a duty of care or travel risk management system in place? What is it and where would employees find it?
6. How do you assess how many travelers you have globally and where do they go to determine the level and type of care required each year?
7. What support do you provide to travelers when they have medical emergencies or accidents on the road and how is the process communicated so they know how to use it?
8. How would security or medical evacuations be handled? With one number 24/7 worldwide? Does your security or medical response firm handle worldwide security & medical evacuations?
9. Do you have a Travel (Operational) Risk Program with communications, Travel Risk Management Policy, Travel Approval Process, and training?
10. Who is responsible for employee safety in your organization before and during travel? Do you have a corporate security team? If yes, how many people are there on that team?

If you are not comfortable with your answers here, you should have a risk assessment. We have partners who would be happy to contact you and provide this assessment. They can also share tools, best practices, and technologies. Please let us know how we can help you address these items. Thank you to our friends at iJET for helping us pull these questions together.

Be safe out there!