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TRAVEL RISK MANAGEMENT 2015
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Q2 Does your organisation have a speciic duty of care (or similar) policy covering international/cross-border business travel? If so, what does this include?
We believe we have a duty of care for our travellers, because we want to be sure that all our employees have good working conditions. We campaign for the rights of women and sustainability, and we believe that the irst to beneit from our policies should be our own employees.
Q3 How does your organisation bring together the functions of the diferent internal stakeholders in managing travel security and what is your role? To what extent is senior management involved and how (active participation, reporting)?
We have a global travel policy written by Human Resources (HR), security and myself as Risk Manager. Senior management is involved through the head of HR.
Q4 In practical terms, how do you handle Travel Risk Management in your daily activities? What is (are) your biggest challenge(s) and what solutions are you looking for?
Q5 Can you give us an example where your organisation had to deal with a Travel Risk Management issue? How did you handle it? What lessons did you learn from it?
Our incidents range from getting advice for a security problem to repatriating a person who has been seriously injured. Sometimes people ask for advice which is not an emergency. There can be incidents involving VIPs which are not under our contracts with them. We try to be lexible and help.
Q6 What best practices you would share with a Risk Manager starting the process in his/her organisation and what advice would you give?
Choose your travel agencies and assistance company carefully because it is very important to know where travellers are and be able to get a recap quickly. It is also very useful to identify whether someone who is asking for assistance, such as repatriation, is really part of our group and covered by our policy.
Remember that people can be more anxious when they are travelling and may not react to problems as they would do in more familiar surroundings at home. Sometimes a call with someone who can discuss the situation calmly is enough.
Q7 How do you justify to your senior executives that Travel Risk Management programmes are a worthwhile investment on short and long term issues?
We do sometimes go through a tender process to make sure our costs are in line with the market, but the company view is that you get what you pay for, and if you do not have the right services, our people could sufer.
We have a global travel insurance policy for the group and contract separately
Over the last ive years, travellers have become more
conscious of the risks and ask what services and with International SOS for emergency
security devices are available. response. Sometimes it has taken a while for small subsidiaries in remote countries that we have acquired to want to join if they have not been part of a group scheme, but it only takes one or two incidents for them to see its value. Fortunately, it is not a problem to get the coverage limits that we want.
We work with a number of travel agencies, and it is mandatory for employee travel to be booked through one of them. They report immediately to the International SOS TravelTracker system, so that at any one time we know how many people are travelling and where they are going. This also gives us the opportunity to see when someone has booked to go to certain destinations, and we can go to our intranet for further information.
Everyone travels with our emergency numbers and the details of our travel insurance. If there is an emergency, depending on the circumstances, they contact either the company’s security department or International SOS. Once that happens, they communicate with me as Risk Manager, and I make sure that everyone who should be involved knows what is happening, including our insurer/broker. Everyone will do what he or she has to do. I do not have a major role in the technical or medical response; that is for security or International SOS.