With geo-political instabilities, security concerns and extreme weather, 2015 has been another difficult year for travel risk managers. Preparing for these eventualities to ensure your employees are safe when abroad and business disruption is kept to a minimum, is absolutely essential.
Yet, according to a recent survey Mantic Point conducted, 52% of business travellers said either their company didn’t have a formal travel management policy or they didn’t know if one existed.
Our annual travel risk survey invited almost 2000 travellers to answer questions about the level of travel risk information employer’s provided them before and during their trips. The results we obtained provide an interesting insight into the state of travel risk management in organisations.
The majority of respondents didn’t receive information before they commenced their trip. Of those travellers that did receive information, just a handful said there was an up to date, current risk assessment for their trip destination. This demonstrates that, even for businesses that are striving to manage travel risk, they are failing to do so effectively.
Another area that the survey explored was respondent perceptions of risk when travelling abroad. We asked travellers to quantify their view on the number of countries with current security alerts. Most respondents massively underestimated the level of risk.
At the time of the survey, according to iJET, the risk intelligence analyst that powers Mantic Point travel risk solutions, there were 118 city and country travel risk alerts in place across the globe. This is significantly more than the 20 alerts that 55% of respondents estimated to be active.
These findings illustrate that corporate travellers are not aware or prepared for potential incidents when on trips. Travel risk managers need to provide relevant information to fulfil their organisation’s duty of care responsibilities and ensure travellers are wise to potential incidents that could occur. Companies that fail to protect employees on business-related trips risk severe fines, reputation damage, plus a loss in staff confidence.
Mantic Point provide and support risk management solutions for numerous organisations, large and small, so they can manage employee itineraries, based on the impact of real time events across complete journeys.
If you’d like to know more about the service we provide to organisations, please get in touch or arrange a demo.
