LGBTQ Traveler Safety & Security

Sometimes it's easier not to talk about it.

That goes for LGBTQ people but also for their employers. A company that hides behind a blanket corporate policy that "everyone is equal" is simply avoiding the subject—because one-size-fits-all does not fit everyone well, especially in terms of traveler safety and security. True support for a diverse workforce can occur only when policymakers, decision-makers, managers and employees talk openly and frankly about what each individual needs in order to do their job safely.

BTN decided to talk about it. Managing editor Amanda Metcalf gathered travel stakeholders, LGBTQ stakeholders and some who are both.

BTN: Sheah, you manage Cummins' travel security and crisis response programs, and the company proactively supports LGBTQ employees as part of those efforts. What prompted that attention?

Hilton: We are a global corporation with multiple businesses that design, manufacture, distribute and service diesel and natural gas engines and related technologies. We have travelers, expats and employees all over the world. All of our security services tie back to diversity being one of Cummins' key values. Our approach is encouraging diversity so that we get a more well-rounded workforce. Since we have customers all around the world, we have to ensure that employees feel secure and confident in the support they will receive while traveling to support the business or working on assignment away from their home.

BTN: When and how has your department been called to action for LGBTQ travelers?

Hilton: We've actually had a few cases, not a problem at all but just helping employees with concerns that they have prior to travel, typically. We're available 24/7. We have a bank of operators, and then we work with iJET to supply various intelligence products for employees. We had one where a woman was applying for a visa to go to India, and she didn't know how to respond to some of the spouse questions. We were able to support with doing some of the research to understand how that process should work for her.

This is a little bit less around travel, but the Twin Cities Pride Festival was occurring about a week after the Orlando shooting. We had some employees who coordinated our booth and volunteers to run it who just voiced some concern. Proactively, we worked with the Cummins event coordinators to have a plan in place of how they could reach out to us if they needed emergency support.

BTN: So employees can come to you with questions or concerns, but how do you protect employees who have not approached you? You can't track sexual orientation or gender identification, right? Or ask people to identify.

Hilton: Regardless of what form of diversity we're talking about, especially when we're looking at travel, our No. 1 goal—and this is on our policy, as well—is to make sure that the traveler is comfortable with the situation [and] if they are not, that they have the option and the right to choose not to take a trip. So where we help balance that is giving the employee as much information and resources as possible so that they can make a decision that they feel most comfortable with.

We try to provide the information upfront so no one has to disclose to us anything that they maybe don't want to share. We provide the LGBT security assessment rating in all of our documentation. We provide a lot of upfront LGBT and other diversity resources so that people can go seek it out versus having to ask us and give out some of that information that may be private to them. It's an optional disclosure that way, but we can still answer a lot of their questions.

Du Preez: You know, organizations need to have a proactive approach to their travel programs in consideration. Are you looking at including risk assessment, communication and training for the LGBTQ community? These are things that organizations need to do. It's information that needs to be gathered and monitored and updated frequently to determine how that situation is developing in the cities and countries that the travelers are traveling to. Having documented policy around that to include all travelers, which obviously includes the LGBTQ community, and then making sure that we're communicating, that we're offering advice and training if needed or on-demand type training if somebody says, "Hey, you know, I'm traveling to this country, and I don't feel comfortable. What can I do to make myself more aware of the situations and create that safer environment?"

BTN: Have any of you worked with anyone who has actively said, "I don't want to go on this trip or to this destination?"

Hilton: At Cummins, we have had situations or a request to maybe delay travel. I don't think that any of the cases was related specifically to LGBT concern. We've always had other issues where, given the current risk environment, they made that decision.

Jones: It's not necessarily LGBT related, but we had a quite high-level director from the Tata Group who was traveling from St. Petersburg back to London. She was taken aside by an FSB agent, which is the [successor to the] KGB, and was taken into a room and questioned for about five hours. This was a female, and, you know, she was left very, very shaken. They asked questions relating to her visa and the travel arrangements. Unfortunately, Tata used a dodgy visa company that they didn't know was dodgy. She then went to the British embassy, and they basically said to her, "Sorry, madam, you need to go to the Russian embassy." The Russian embassy effectively passed it back to the U.K, so she was caught between a rock and a hard place. The second time she went, she got shut in a room in Moscow. Then, she was given a letter, and they basically said that she needed to come back to answer several more questions.

She needed to travel quite frequently to Russia from London, and she just said to her employer, "I can't do this. I don't know what to do." Then, she contacted us as a last resort. Eventually, we got her name taken off the list. We work specifically on individual cases in the event that they are either incarcerated or there's an issue abroad where governments tend to wash their hands.

BTN: Bruce, have you at Marriott had to deal with anyone who felt insecure or threatened?

Rohr: I've seen it almost a little bit opposite of the question: Our managers at our hotel in Cairo were told that they are kind of a safe haven for the LGBT community, whether that's expats or travelers going through Cairo, because the hotel developed a reputation for being a safe place and that spread through word of mouth. I personally can tell you I was asked to go on a trip to the Middle East a few years ago and had to have some really thorough conversations with my leadership team because one of the countries I was going to was Saudi Arabia and I was absolutely concerned about what that meant for me.

BTN: How did it play out, if you don't mind me asking?

Rohr: I mean, I'm not going to lie. This is really hard for me to admit, but I definitely kept myself closeted within that country because my safety and security trumped my need to be out.

BTN: Can or should a company decline to send travelers of any particular demographic somewhere based on the company's own concerns about security?

Fidas: This is such a good question. It's frankly one that a lot of companies are grappling with. What HRC talks to businesses about is that fundamentally, the center of the decision-making process would be the self-determination of an employee. There are a lot of demographic groups that will face challenges. For example, someone who depends on a wheelchair for mobility may not want to be relocated to Rome. Are we talking quality of life? Are we talking about a literal inability to get around town? Similarly, a gay man [might agree] to go to a hardship post. That's not that dissimilar from other career choices that people make. With room for some exceptions, it should not be the unilateral decision of the company to say, "You know what? You're LGBT," unless there's really concrete evidence as to why that poses an imminent threat to that person's safety or standing.

Hilton: It's that willingness to have a really frank conversation with the security professionals, the employee, their manager and make sure that if they have concerns, they're fully informed to be able to make a decision. Then, if they choose to go on a trip where there could be potentially higher risks or take an expat assignment, it's assessing: Are there steps that [the company] can take to reduce their risk? Can we coordinate a car service? Can we locate you in a particular neighborhood that has additional safety features? It's having flexibility to fit the needs of each individual traveler.

BTN: Deena, what else is HRC noticing in its work with corporations?

Fidas: We are seeing a heightened sense of awareness, but also the other side of that coin: challenge around transgender mobility. And while there are some options, if you will, available to for example a gay man or a lesbian woman to not to be out, there are some unique legal challenges with respect to visas, gender markers on passports, documentation that would be prohibited in terms of a transgender person simply saying, "Oh, well, I'll just be closeted."

Part of this work is really just opening up the line of communication between HR, those in management and the individual employee to be able to explain precisely what the challenges are or whether they were more cultural or those are actually physical safety.

BTN: It sounds like the ideal of optimizing travel programs—by getting HR, security, finance, operations and others to work together—Graduates from an aspiration to a necessity in order to truly ensure the security of LGBTQ travelers and expats.

Hilton: That's true for us. We have built, in each of our major regions, a crisis-response structure, a cross-functional team who's trained in how to respond in various situations. In order to really thoroughly support an employee, you have to be able to reach out on the ground to security, HR, help and safety, maybe even legal, and have all of those relationships be really strong. A lot of times, if something does happen where you need to provide extra support for a traveling employee, it happens very quickly. Maybe you're talking about making decisions about spend or where to move someone, and having everyone at the table at one time really helps that process move along.

BTN: So how should travel managers incorporate all this into travel policy? What legal protections do business travelers have based on where they live or where their company is based?

Hilton: Each country really varies. You need to work very closely with your legal team. Because we want to encourage that diversity and support a wide range of employees and encourage that movement of people, we provide a lot of support to travelers. We've got a medical vendor that we support. In terms of legal support, it can really vary based on the country laws. It's really hard to put into a policy, but at least in my opinion, you provide as much support as you possibly can and have a policy that really reinforces to employees that you will support them if they run into issues while they're doing business for you.

BTN: Travel policies often read as an assignment list of responsibilities. The company promises to do X, and the traveler is obligated or responsible to do Y. But LGBTQ safety and security policy really skews toward the company. There's not much you can ask of the travelers themselves.

Du Preez: It becomes voluntary. We recommend that organizations have a travel risk management policy—separate [from the] travel policy that gives you initial guidance on things such as the hotels, ground transportation and medical support. Then you can offer additional advice and guidance to the LGBT community, saying, "This is completely voluntary. This is made available to you by the organization: additional training or resources that you can use prior to your travel or during your travel." In addition, you would have your business travel insurance and, as Sheah had mentioned, work very closely with your legal team. Several clients that we work with have protocols in place and have relationships with local legal resources, [as well].

Rohr: I recently was asked to speak to Lockheed Martin's global LGBT Leadership Forum not necessarily because they don't have the policies in place—this is probably a fair statement of many travel managers: It's more about awareness. Especially if we're talking a long-term assignment and you want to encourage someone to go for that assignment overseas into a place where it's not LGBT friendly, knowing those implications and having that awareness. We still have a long ways to go within the travel industry, especially for travel managers to fully understand that perspective.

BTN: For a company to really feel like it's doing as much as it can with a risk management program—for all travelers—the price tag can be pretty hefty, no?

Du Preez: It can be [but] you also have to look at what happens if things go bad and you haven't planned and put a program in place. It becomes a lot more expensive on the back end to respond when you don't have procedures in place than paying for a plan upfront and being proactive.

BTN: Could small companies with limited budgets and legal resources be afraid to take small steps toward serving their LGBTQ travelers and then face liability for an incomplete program, for lack of a better term?

Du Preez: Yeah, I think it's really hard. What organizations need to do is at least start somewhere. Start small and be able to show that you're taking the initiative to put a program in place. For example, iJET has the Travel Risk Management Maturity Model. We evaluate programs across 10 key process areas, and we kind of give them a gap analysis of where to put their focus so they can at least spend the budget they have on fixing the critical areas, bringing them up to par. Then, you can start focusing on the more detailed issues. And very targeted. You look at where specifically you're doing business so that you're only paying attention to those critical regions, that you're not just throwing a blanket program in place.

BTN: So Sheah, do you feel Cummins' proactive outreach and aggressive policy Have headed off troublesome scenarios for travelers? Has it made a tangible difference?

Hilton: When employees know that they can come to you with whatever concerns they have and that your intentions are to create a safe environment for them, that allows a lot of things to come to the table that you may not have known about had they been hesitant to share that information. I would definitely say yes: Having these plans and programs in place has made a big difference in our ability to prevent crises on the back end.