What is travel risk management?
Employers have a legal and moral duty of care when employees are travelling on their behalf, irrespective of the duration of travel. When employees travel, they are often faced with risks which pose a threat not only to their travel plans but also to their physical safety and/or mental wellbeing. These risks can arise for a number of reasons, including:
- Political crises
- Terrorism
- Socio-economic instability
- Criminality
- Military conflicts
- Natural disasters
- Extreme weather events
- Outbreaks of communicable disease
- Changes in entry requirements
Travel risk management is about assessing and addressing the risks that employees face when travelling for business. Since the pandemic, the travel environment is not only more complex, but it is exceedingly more volatile. Higher volatility equates to higher risk and organisations are looking for ways to enhance their travel risk management. A recent survey of 200+ global organisations revealed that only 24% believed they had a strong travel risk management programme in place1.
How does Key Travel help customers with travel risk management?
Key Travel is an international travel management company that is dedicated to reducing the cost, complexity, risk, and carbon-impact of travel exclusively for non-profit organisations so that they can deploy more of their resources on delivering their missions. We offer non-profits one of the travel sector’s most advanced and configurable travel risk management solutions, KT Safety, using technology co-developed with Amadeus, the world’s largest provider of travel technology.
What is KT Safety?
KT Safety consists of an interlinked programme for the employer and for the traveller.
For the employer, KT Safety comprises:
- A proprietary “Travel Risk Audit” that benchmarks their organisation’s current travel risk management programmes versus global best practice.
- Inbuilt policy compliance. We embed the organisation’s travel risk management and security policies into online and offline approval workflows so that booker compliance is built in. We can also incorporate risk ratings from insurers as a key element of travel approval.
- Automatic exclusion of high risk providers and locations. We conduct assessments on providers and exclude high risk ones from our booking systems e.g. airlines with poor safety records. We do the same for high risk destinations in liaison with customers.
- A risk management app which provides:
- A risk intelligence dashboard with country profiles and destination risk assessments as well as dynamic risk updates (pre-trip, in-trip) on all trips booked by employees. The content is provided from 600+ live sources by Riskline, the world’s largest provider of risk and security information operating in 220 countries, and covers travel risk intelligence, political risk analysis, security assessments, operational insights such as visa changes or train strikes and specific security services insights.
- Automatic risk alerts are emailed to the client’s travel/security manager a) if more than a defined number of employees are booked to travel on the same flight and b) an incident has occurred in an area that employees are travelling to. The alerting functionality is configurable by severity of incident and location to suit individual requirements by organisation.
- Traveller tracking. The system provides a live map interface identifying where the organisation’s travellers are at any moment in time based on their digital itineraries with push pins colour-coded according to location risk status with the ability to contact and communicate with them via SMS, email or phone.
- Traveller communication via GPS-enabled location requests which function as a quick and easy way to check on the welfare and location of any of the client’s travellers.
At the traveller level, we provide:
- A mobile trip management app which integrates all elements of a trip into one itinerary and provides up-to-date destination risk assessments and alerts with updates 7 days before travel, during the 7 days until travel, and in-trip, so that at any moment prior to and during travel, travellers can cancel, postpone or change their travel plans to mitigate risk.
- 24/7/365 emergency support and incident handling. In response to major events, we scale up and resource a specialist in-house Crisis Management Team who are on hand 24/7 to support all traveller needs. Our crisis response expertise has been developed and operated inhouse since 1980. We are partnered with the leading disaster emergency NGOs globally who are first responders in major crises around the world.
Conclusion
Travel risk does not sleep, especially post-pandemic. We are living in volatile times and organisations are recognising the need to enhance their duty of care to employees travelling on their behalf. Key Travel is an international travel management company that is dedicated to serving non-profit organisations exclusively. We have developed one of the travel sector’s most advanced travel risk management capabilities so that we can support our customers in keeping their employees safe and secure as they travel to carry out their much needed work across the world.