Covid-19 pandemic has shone a spotlight on travel risk management, which creates an opportunity for travel buyers who want to bolster their own risk management programs.
As most business travelers have been off the road for more than a year, they likely will be more amenable to policies and procedures geared toward ensuring their safety when they restart travel. They will be pleased to be informed of health and safety requirements for their destination and less likely to bristle at efforts designed to keep track of where they are in real-time.
Management, meanwhile, should be more amenable to these policies and procedures as well, given the hyper-focus on employee safety—even if it comes at an increased cost both in travel itself and with partners in the risk management sphere needed to help with those procedures. The memories of the early days of the pandemic, when many companies had to scramble to see which employees were in areas with the most severe outbreaks and find the best ways to get them safely home, are still fresh. For travel managers who found their policies were lacking or failed, they now have a concrete example of what can go wrong.
Ideally, the Covid-19 virus will someday tumble far down the list of travel-related concerns, as will some of the more stringent policies related to it—the increase in pre-trip approval workflows, for example. That won’t, however, diminish the travel manager’s task of ensuring their travelers remain safe and can both access and receive communication of potential risks at any point of their journey.
As such, travel buyers should not miss this chance to take an in-depth look at their risk management policy, keeping in mind what has worked and what hasn’t worked during the pandemic, and take advantage of what could be unprecedented buy-in from both travelers and management alike.