KesselRun engages organizations of all sizes to help measure and mitigate travel risk.  In general, travel risk management is the process an organization implements to reduce its legal and fiduciary responsibilities to keep its travelers safe when traveling on company business.  At an organizational level, risk mitigation is comprised of many touch-points within a company including:

• Human Resources (HR)
• Internal Audit and Compliance
• Information Technology (IT)
• Risk and Security
• Travel
• Traveler Safety

When employees travel for business, organizations have both a legal and fiduciary responsibility to their travelers.  Depending on the specific travel patterns and nature of travel, a company’s legal responsibilities may vary greatly—an organization with travelers working for a defense contractor located in high risk destinations may perceive a different legal requirement than a sales-driven company with travelers flying or driving to relatively safe locations.  It’s important for the company to maintain visibility into the location of their travelers across the globe.

From a fiduciary perspective, the burden the organization has to some extent rests on its perceived legal exposure should a traveler fall ill, get hurt, or suffer a geo-political event such as a terror attack.  KesselRun has found; however, that companies perceive differing levels of the duty of care it owes a traveler based not only on potential legal exposure, but also its corporate culture.

Some organizations seek the bare minimum duty of care and traveler safety, and others proactively seek to do everything possible to ensure traveler safety.  Each approach coming with a different level of financial impact—both up-front and per incident—to the organization.

Organizational efforts to ensure travel safety can be both a legal and fiduciary obligation.  While there can be no guarantee that an organization can completely mitigate risk, the ability to track and contact an individual traveling on company business is considered best practice and helps ensure fast help in the event of an emergency.

Most companies help ensure traveler safety by tracking its travelers based on their trip details as provided by their Travel Management Company (TMC) to a third party risk management provider.  In the event of a medical, terrorist, COVD-19, or other related issue that would cause an abrupt change to a travelers’ itinerary this process satisfies these duty of care aspects for a corporate travel program.  However, in the event where the traveler does not utilize an authorized TMC, the business travelers’ organization has no way to either track the traveler or help that traveler in the event of an emergency.  In this case, use of other tools such as CapTrav can fill this void, helping to guard against a bad traveler experience or legal exposure as a result of an unforeseen emergency where the company is ultimately responsible.

As with most other aspects of the corporate travel supply chain, travel risk management needs to be implemented with the core values and goals of the organization and cannot be pursued as a one-size-fits-all approach.  In addition to understanding the business habits of the traveler, KesselRun also gets a handle on the client’s culture as it engages its client to build or advise on a travel risk management program.

Our Travel Risk Assessment engagements have become one of our most popular engagements over the past several years as companies begin to manage risk assessment more closely.  Today, companies are extremely focused on traveler security and duty of care, and the number of third-party solutions in the marketplace continues to grow.

KesselRun is an independent, non-biased consulting organization that specializes in corporate travel that can help guide you through executing your risk management plan and process.

Contact Us For a Free Corporate Travel Audit.