Traveler Tracking: Where Are Your Travelers Right Now?

Two weeks after Lucy Mosca was hired as FTI Consulting’s global travel manager last March, a Germanwings airplane en route to Barcelona crashed into a mountain in France, killing all 150 passengers. At the time, employees weren’t mandated to use FTI’s travel management company, BCD Travel. Only half of FTI’s 4,500 employees knew they had a travel management company and actually used it to book travel. Mosca walked into a board meeting to a slew of questions.

“I have no way of knowing where people are unless they’re using our agency. I can tell you I’m 60 percent sure we didn’t have anyone onboard the plane,” she told the board. “How does that make you feel?”

The board was taken aback. FTI pledged to issue a mandate requiring employees to book travel through BCD, which FTI uses in North America, Hong Kong and Australia and is implementing in Latin America. The mandate wasn’t yet in place, though, when an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia two months later or in November when terrorists attacked Paris.

FTI employees were safe in all three incidents, and the company issued the agency mandate in December.

No Wonder Awareness Has Grown

“Last year, it seemed like every month there was some major thing, and that’s just what the average person sees,” said George Taylor, vice president of global operations for travel risk management and security firm iJet. “There are many other events that take place worldwide that aren’t raised to everyone’s attention.” According to iJet, 6,000 travel disruptions occurred in 2015. Add duty-of-care regulations and increased international travel, and companies are homing in on traveler tracking.

A BTN online poll of 204 travel buyers in January revealed that 71 percent track travelers using TMC itinerary data, 30 percent use credit card data, and 12 percent use GPS via tools that tap into travelers’ mobile devices. Seventeen percent aren’t tracking their travelers, and others have traveler safety and security programs with providers like iJet and International SOS, which use data from TMCs, airlines, hotel aggregators and others to track traveler whereabouts and provide emergency assistance.

After the Paris attacks, however, many evaluated their strategies: 32 percent reviewed their tracking tools, and the same number evaluated whether to expand their tracking policies. Nearly 10 percent who did not use GPS tracking were considering it. Forty-two percent took no new action.

Taylor confirmed that most corporations still take a passive approach: using TMC itinerary data, which can be problematic especially in an emergency situation when plans tend to change. More aggressive tactics are gaining traction, particularly as mobile devices play a larger role. Companies can establish a check-in procedure, for example requiring travelers to call a supervisor or a 24-hour call center twice a day. Mobile apps have streamlined this concept using one-touch check-in capability for travelers to signify they are safe. And demand has picked up for the near-real-time tracking that GPS technology provides, according to Taylor. “In the last two years it’s grown significantly. [At least] 10 percent of our client base has started to use some of these tools.”

Traveler Tracking Supplements

The changeability and potentially incomplete nature of TMC itinerary data has influenced the adoption of mobile check-in and GPS tracking strategies. Hotel attachment rates, for example, historically hover at around 50 percent to 60 percent for the industry as a whole. For firms like FTI Consulting, in which 85 percent of travel bookings are billed back to clients, there’s little motivation to book through a preferred TMC, leaving vast swaths of traveler-location data unaccounted for through that channel.

Filling the Gaps

TMCs continue to innovate tools to drive hotel attachment rates, and technology providers like Concur want to fill the channel-fragmentation gap with solutions that capture outside bookings and offer reporting. Whether Concur can push that data back to the TMC for consolidated reporting depends. “The TMCs absolutely have to build an export from Concur’s API and would need to be certified by Concur [for that] to happen,” said senior director of global travel and marketing services Ralph Colunga. For locations where FTI doesn’t have a TMC relationship, Mosca took a pass on Concur because it can’t flow open-booking data to a travel security firm like iJET or International SOS.

Payment suppliers also can identify a traveler’s last known location through card-swipe data. “It’s not as robust or as usable to account for people or, more importantly, to act in an emergency situation to save their lives,” Taylor said. “It’s important if you have no other ways of communicating with someone.”

The Mobile Route

Mobile tools enable corporations to send real-time prompts for travelers to check in to confirm their locations and safety immediately. For high-risk travel, GPS tracking enables geofencing, which allows a company to receive notifications when a traveler’s device enters or leaves virtual boundaries the company has set. Travelers also receive alerts instructing them to stay put or leave the area. Such tracking also is useful in transporting VIPs, enabling travel managers to ensure the car passes certain GPS markers.

Mobile tracking strategies have their limitations, too, points out International SOS executive vice president Tim Daniel. GPS drains mobile device batteries and depend on a data connection to transmit a traveler’s location. Travelers also have to switch on the GPS and keep the device with them. All are simple issues that can significantly undermine tracking capabilities.

For these reasons, Daniel said, GPS tracking can’t replace other measures. Instead, it should be part of an overall travel security program, and that program should be in place long before a traveler sets foot on a plane. “A phone doesn’t know where you’re going next week, so we still need those itineraries.”

Philosophically, mobile traveler tracking is anything but straightforward. Travel managers must tread carefully in the area of personal privacy. As bring-your-own-device environments proliferate, a request for employees to install tracking software on personal phones is a big ask. Even if the technology were to be installed on a company phone with the intention to protect employees, being continually tracked, especially outside office hours, feels like an infringement.

To avoid pitfalls, corporations have so far offered opt-in GPS tracking, as does iJet. “We can’t reach in and track them without them being aware of being tracked,” Taylor said. “That’s our policy. Nobody would buy [the solution] if we could turn it on anytime we wanted. We want people to use it, not be suspicious of it.”

Once travelers understand that GPS tracking protects them, however, they’re more apt to use it. Colunga said the majority of Concur employees opt in. “We can only help those who help us,” Colunga said. “If we don’t know you’re there, we don’t know what kind of assistance you need and we don’t have a way of communicating with you [or to] provide much in way of support services. Everyone plays a part in this.”

Buy-In & Ownership Remain Challenging

Getting buy-in from corporate executives for any kind of traveler tracking can be challenging. “Telling [senior executives] we’ll get more discounts [by booking through the TMC] doesn’t matter because they don’t see it and don’t care,” said Mosca, “but duty of care is what they can see and feel.”

What further helped Mosca’s case was that two high-ranking executives were traveling in Paris during the November attacks. She tracked one through itinerary data and the other by emailing executive assistants asking if they knew of people in Paris. “Even though it was late [at night], I was able to contact them to find out if they were OK,” Mosca said. “At that point, I contacted the CEO directly and said something needed to be done.” FTI also is talking with a security and medical services supplier to serve travelers in need.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel vice president of global product marketing Carinne Saulet often sees a gap in that area. Larger clients have more resources, she said, but 90 percent of CWT’s smaller clients rely on itinerary tracking and insurance policies and have no procedure in place for travelers in need. “There’s this misperception that if they have a strong insurance they’re covered, when actually the insurance is just there to pay if they need a doctor,” Saulet said. “There is a need to have professionals take care of you, direct you to the right place, be able to act, organize and [offer] evacuation support.”

Beyond Business Travel

Events like the Paris attacks raise questions about whether corporations’ tracking efforts should extend to all employees, regardless of whether they travel, according International SOS’s Daniel. “Each organization has to determine what’s appropriate for them because as you make more people part of the mission, the complexity of the tools goes up significantly.” International SOS encourages companies to make sure their traveler tracking works well and once it’s under control to expand the system to all employees.