Travel risk management and duty of care

Who answers the phone at night?

That depends on the mandate, and you learn what you are getting before it starts. For a single project it can be a named on-call rota with us. For a running program we work with partner operations centers, meaning global security operations centers staffed around the clock, which we use in every region and which hold our procedure and your escalation chain.

What we do not do is put a number in a policy and leave open who sits behind it. Who picks up, what that person may decide alone, and at what point we come in, is written into the program.

We already buy travel insurance and an assistance service. Is that a travel risk program?

No. Insurance pays after the event and an assistance line reacts to a call. Neither one decides whether the trip should happen, briefs the traveler, or tells your duty manager what to do in the twenty minutes before the assistance provider picks up. Those are the parts that reduce the incident count.

It also falls short legally. The duty of care asks for assessment, instruction and precaution, all of it work done before departure. An assistance number in a card holder evidences none of the three. Insurance and assistance belong in a program, as its last line.

How long does it take to stand one up?

A single number would be dishonest here, because the spread is real. One trip or a short project can be covered at short notice, in days if it has to be. A travel policy that holds up across a whole organization takes weeks, because approval thresholds, briefings and the escalation chain have to be agreed with HR, employee representatives and data protection. Add a crisis team that has to be built, staffed and exercised, and it becomes months.

After the first conversation we tell you which of those three sizes you are looking at, including when the honest answer is larger than the one you wanted.

Does this cover freelancers and subcontractors?

Yes, and it has to, though the duty arrives from a different direction than for your own staff. The employment relationship covers the people on your payroll. Everyone else falls under the coordination duty described above, which arises as soon as people employed by different companies work in the same place. On top of that sits liability for negligent selection. An employer who engages a provider it has not vetted answers for that choice.

In practice this means defining the scope of your travel policy beyond your payroll before the first incident. It also means the briefing given to the subcontractor's driver is part of your duty, not only his. We document both the briefing and the verification, so that you can evidence the duty was met.

Do you track our travelers?

It depends on where they are going, and the answer is yes more often than the question expects. In some environments, knowing roughly where somebody is when they stop answering is the difference between a search and a response, and people going into those places usually want it. On a trip to a European capital the same measure is surveillance with no benefit attached.

We take the privacy side seriously, because a measure people quietly opt out of protects nobody. So it is specified by risk tier. Check-in rules for most travel, where the missed check-in is itself the signal and compliance is high. Continuous location only where the destination warrants it, agreed with employee representatives where they exist and written into the policy. And where location is held, break the glass is usually the right design. The location stays invisible to everyone until a defined emergency opens it, with every access logged and reviewable.

Set up that way it survives the data protection conversation, rather than being quietly disabled six months later.