When employees travel on behalf of your company, it’s crucial to let them feel you stand behind them. Whether they are traveling on a business trip abroad or domestically, they are likely to be confronted with unknown circumstances and environments. Road accidents, disease epidemics, pandemics, and natural disasters are just a few risks that can affect your employees’ safety and health. It can also affect the success of your business trip. Conflict, crime, terrorism, or political and social unrest are other concerns of traveler security and well-being.
So how does a travel management company keep your employees safe? How do they use travel management software to manage risks? Read on and find out.
But first, let’s understand risk management and why it is critical to corporate responsibility.
What Is Travel Risk Management, And Why Is It Important?
Travel risk management is the process that predicts, prevents, and responds to unexpected threats that business travelers can encounter while on their trip. It could be bad weather, social unrest, terrorism, a natural disaster, or a public health issue such as a pandemic.
Travel risk management is necessary for many reasons. It is about the duty of care and legal responsibility of your company. It also concerns your moral obligation and employer ethics, which results in employee retention and recruitment.
How A Travel Management Company Keeps Your Employees Safe
You can have peace of mind when you hire a professional travel management company. They help businesses meet their duty of care responsibilities. Also, they provide solutions to identify, manage and communicate risks.
Here are some of the ways expert travel management companies can help businesses.
Being Prepared
Travel management companies take a step-by-step approach to setting up, assessing, and reviewing their travel risk management programs. They support your needs by managing predictable risks and threats.
Travel management companies assess the risks and provide information on places where there are serious medical and security travel risks. They provide your travelers with alerts, updates, and restrictions related to the pandemic, besides vaccination info and local guidelines, so you know what to do before you go. These alerts make it easy for you to adjust your travel plans.
Provide Insights Driven By Data
An experienced travel management company will help you make your employee traveling experience better by giving you forecasts. They use travel management software that gives you data from existing sources. They will gather information about your business travel to enhance your experience. With this data, your travel manager may spot problems, give solutions, and minimize travel plan changes.
Offers Flexibility
A great travel management company makes it easy for business travelers to make: airline, accommodation, or car reservations. They use travel management software, so you can cancel when necessary and get a reasonable refund.
This kind of flex allows the freedom to book as long as you know you are covered if something changes.
Business Traveler Tracking
Good service providers will add a travel tracker so the management can search and list all the bookings to help with the workflow. Any efficient travel management software should come with a custom-built corporate travel tracker. So you can keep an eye on every business trip of your employees. Even better, it will ensure they follow all the guidelines. This practice is perfect for businesses and travel managers with multiple travelers on the go since it allows them to track their travel itineraries in real time.
24/7 Traveler Support
A travel management company helps you do your job and protect yourself from potential risks with many traveler and well-being help solutions.
They will offer airport support, protection, identity help, digital health and wellness, and worldwide travel management.
Their team will be available 24/7 to answer any questions you have in no time. They will provide concierge help, make group reservations, and quickly manage business travel.
When needed, they will provide all travelers with destination information and give them access to travel safety info, help, and advice on what to do if something goes wrong. Also, they will ensure everyone has 24/7 medical and security information and support for all destinations.
Full Circle Process
If you are looking for a risk management solution, one of the most typical is to assign a travel management company to book all the travel.
They will use travel management software to take care of all the phases, from pre-trip approval to post-trip analysis, so you can get a complete picture of how the risk management process works.
They will also have pre-trip approval systems that make it easy to create custom approval processes. This thorough assessment helps you cut down on risks and travel expenses. The most important part of a managed solution is keeping track of all business trips.
Alerts, Warnings, Notifications
Having travel advisories and alerts is essential with all the changes in politics and health. Your travel management company will inform employees when their flights may get rerouted or rescheduled. They will collect and share info about ongoing and new situations to keep your employees updated.
Professional services help companies create customized strategies to manage travel-related risks. They take care of the planning and implementation and automate workflows to ensure your employees are planning, traveling, staying, and coming back safely.
Service providers like ITILITE use an advanced online platform that integrates with multiple devices. These platforms are essential for managing business trips and helping employees to travel with protection and safety.
Companies should have a plan in place in case of an emergency on a business trip. Here is why, they can maintain a duty of care and increase trust in the organization.
Guidance On Healthcare
Many responsible travel management companies will create health safety guides with practical advice. The guidance may include ways to prevent water-borne illnesses or food poisoning. For example, you might want to avoid street food and only drink bottled water to prevent getting sick. Employees can also get health safety alerts based on where they are traveling.
Closing Thoughts: Choosing The Right Travel Management Company To Handle Travel Risks
A top-tier travel management company assists you in enhancing business travel opportunities for your staff. You should seek a solution that helps you fulfill your duty by offering comprehensive risk management capability.
A quality travel management company will allow you to create a maturity model to form policies, train staff, manage data—and communicate that information effectively to your team.
The first step is to pick a service like ITILITE that understands employee needs and has the right solution for your business.
