Duty of care in a new travel landscape

The Covid-19 pandemic reshaped the world of work on many levels and drastically curtailed business travel in the wake of lockdowns across the globe. As economies and borders open up again and a semblance of “normal” operations returns, businesses must navigate the evolving travel risks for employees who are visiting colleagues, clients, and operations, as well as managing projects internationally.

A 2021 Chubb poll of business travellers around the world found that:

• There was a 68% reduction in business travel spend since April 2020.
• 81% of respondents believed they had missed valuable clues provided by body language in physical meetings.
• 74% of these travellers said that the inability to travel affected their ability to generate new business and sales.
• There was an optimistic belief that business travel would grow by 38% during 2022. However, 82% of respondents believed that the pandemic would have a lasting effect on business travel.
  
  

Duty of care in the new world of work

Global travel drives economies across the world. However, the return to business travel holds a number of new and evolving risks to which businesses need to adapt in order to maintain a robust risk management framework. This is known as the “duty of care” – the legal and moral responsibility of the employer to ensure the health, safety, and well-being of its employees in the workplace and while travelling for business.

Fundamentally, this safeguards the primary business-critical assets of any organisation: its people. It also helps to ensure business continuity and compliance, and protects against reputational damage and potentially costly legal issues. 

As the post-pandemic workforce decentralises with more flexible mobile working opportunities, businesses must consider various travel risk factors, including:

• Cybercrime – risks posed by travelling employees accessing unsecure networks in airport terminals, hotels, coffee shops, and so on.
• Infectious diseases – compliance with all controls in airports, planes, public transportation, and even boardrooms is just one aspect of this. If an employee gets sick and needs hospitalisation, this can be compounded by a lack of adequate facilities.
• Natural disasters – the frequency of natural disasters such as wildfires, typhoons, and earthquakes is increasingly playing a role in the travel risk landscape.
• Petty crime – business travellers are often targets of crimes such as pick-pocketing or items being stolen out of hotel rooms.
• Civil unrest – civil uprisings or protests can be disruptive, sudden, and potentially dangerous.
• Travel scams – being duped by scammers may involve arriving to find that a hotel doesn’t have a record of your booking, or worse, does not even exist. Airport and hotel transfers also need to be planned and managed meticulously. Travel scams are a risk even for the savviest of travellers.
• Adhering to travel requirements – it is important to have the correct travel documentation, vaccination records, and pre-flight and post-flight Covid-19 tests, as well as know what restrictions are in place in the destination country. 

While it may seem daunting to manage all the diverse risks of travel, it is important to have a comprehensive risk management plan, coupled with business travel insurance that includes Covid-19 coverages and is designed to offer solutions for potentially challenging scenarios. 

Companies can benefit from partnering with experienced business travel insurers and brokers to help protect their staff from adverse outcomes. The range of available products and added-value services help companies to significantly upscale their duty of care. The role of assistance and insurance providers is to help ensure there is a strong risk management framework to protect a company’s greatest asset – its employees.