Travel risks and adaptation for event profs in a fragmented world

The Covid-19 pandemic changed the game for business travel risks, forcing companies to reassess how much time and effort they put into not just setting expectations around travel risk, but also raising awareness.

A webinar, hosted earlier this month by the Global Business Travel Association, examined how to identify and assess business travel risks, the use of technology to support employees in the event of a crisis and the importance of regularly reviewing and updating travel risk management policies.

Make people’s lives easier. Whatever system is put in place to assess and manage business risks has to be easy to understand and implement, otherwise the rate of adoption will be low. “Even if you have great rules and even better applications, you will still have that additional challenge of education,” says Alex Rodriguez, director, global security communications center at The Walt Disney Company.

Acknowledge company culture. You also need to look at the culture to really understand how best to integrate your product – this means explaining it to employees using language they are familiar with.

“Decide whether you approach business travel as a ‘business enabler’ – whereby you provide a pre-travel briefing in a more relaxed manner, or whether you have a very compliant travel base, where your employees know what resources are available [for corporate travel],” says Kevin Reagan, director, travel risk management solutions at software company Everbridge.

Adapt how travel risk assessments are delivered. Email, in person, informal conversations …mix and match a range of methods when assessing your employees’ travel risk, depending on what they respond better to. “Some [standard] areas we have to check with everyone, on a yearly basis for example, whether they are travelling or not, but for those individuals making actual journeys, we ask our employees what they think about our messaging and how they would like to receive it,” adds Rodriguez.

Making sense of post-travel feedback. Panellists suggested that getting feedback post-travel is one of the most important aspects of assessing what works and what doesn’t work. And while you can't sit down with every single person when they come back from their trip and ask about their hotel and flight experiences, you can use technology to get into levels of granularity, assessing risk ratings depending on destination or issues encountered.