Can travel buyers advance human rights? Maybe. In March 2019, actor George Clooney called for a boycott of the Dorchester Collection of hotels, which includes The Dorchester in London and The Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. The group is owned by Brunei Investment Agency, the sovereign wealth fund of Brunei, whose sultan had made homosexual activity punishable by stoning to death. According to various sources, at least nine financial services companies with combined business travel spend that runs to the billions of dollars joined the boycott over the next fortnight. By the beginning of May, the sultan had backtracked, extending a moratorium on execution to cover the new legislation.
This story proved a rare example of businesses viewing their travel programs through the lens of ethics. Other cases in recent years include canceled conventions in North Carolina in response to the state's "bathroom bill," which excluded gender identity and sexual orientation from antidiscrimination protection. Meanwhile, a U.S.-based travel manager requesting anonymity told BTN: "Uber went through a lot of reputational issues a few years ago. We made a decision we didn't want to be associated with that and pulled them out as an allowed vendor. Uber is back in now because it went through due diligence, including responding to sexual harassment issues and changing its CEO."
Because corporate customers helped achieve change by, in the case of the Dorchester Collection, weaponizing their spending power, it might seem churlish to probe deeply into their actions. Yet, if companies are to be serious and consistent about human rights when buying business travel, the actions necessary are more complicated than a one-off boycott of a hotel company with nine properties owned by a ruler who presides over only 430,000 subjects.
Here's just one example. According to LGBT campaign group Stonewall, 72 countries criminalize same-sex relationships and eight consider them capital crimes. Those eight include Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth funds or royal family members are substantial shareholders in several of the world's leading hotel groups.
Or what about China, another country with extensive ownership of hotels and other businesses in the travel industry? Numerous reports have revealed that China has effectively transformed Xinjiang, home to its Muslim Uighur population, into a prison state. One of the financial services companies that boycotted Dorchester has an exchange-traded fund that owns stock in the Chinese security camera companies whose technology makes Xinjiang the most surveilled place on Earth. That Dorchester boycotter gave a "buy" rating to one of the security camera companies in part because the company would benefit from the Chinese government's "safe country" project for the region.
First Steps for Travel Managers
- Develop a coherent strategy instead of giv-ing knee-jerk reactions.
- Read the United Nations' Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
- Familiarize yourself with your organization's policies and due diligence processes on human rights.
- Review your travel program, including your preferred supplier list, and identify red flags for review under the due diligence process.
- Communicate your company's human rights policy to potential and existing suppliers.
- Ask suppliers to state their human rights policies in detail, e.g., how they treat migrant workers.
- Support suppliers with positive records of respecting employees and local communities.
- Press internally for a refuse-to-fly policy.
- Advise employees about increased risks based on identity and how to mitigate those risks.
- Engage with a focus group of female travelers and members of your company's gay pride network and external campaign groups to see what more you can do.
Many of the same companies that boycotted Dorchester have offices in Saudi Arabia and China and so naturally travel to those countries for business.
Steve Dunne, CEO of Digital Drums, a PR company serving travel and other companies, warned that businesses should avoid "making up policy on ethical issues on the hoof. Companies need to have an [offsite] day and decide what they stand for. If you're not acting consistently across the brand, you're starting to look like an opportunist or a hypocrite. If you do something right, then in the old days, that would have generated good headlines, but increasingly, you're only a couple of keystrokes away on Google from when you did something else that was contradictory."
According to Peter Frankental, economic relations program director of Amnesty International, the Dorchester boycott achieved a good outcome and "it's very positive that companies should be taking a stand on human rights." Yet he added, "In the Dorchester case, it would be hard to argue that boycotting those hotels would directly address a human rights situation directly related to those hotels' commercial activities."
BTN asked Frankental about the controversial views of Donald Trump on race, women, the far right and other issues. Trump is president of the U.S. and founder of real estate company The Trump Org., which owns hotels among other assets. Frankental said, "We wouldn't take a view on whether a company should boycott a hotel because of its owners' views." This was indeed the argument made by Dorchester itself. "We don't tolerate any form of discrimination, we never have and we never will," the hotel group said in response to the boycott. "Our values are far removed from the politics of ownership."
Jafles Pacheco—global category leader for travel, logistics and professional services for technology group Oerlikon and a speaker on LGBTQ travel issues—had mixed feelings about the Dorchester boycott for similar reasons. "Boycotting is always a powerful way of influencing a business to do other things. If it doesn't hurt them in the pocket, they aren't going to change," he said. "However, the Dorchester boycott seemed unfair for the group's employees. They aren't LGBT enemies. But there was a good outcome."
The problem is the lack of an ethical or theoretical framework to help travel managers engage coherently on human rights issues. "We should not be putting profits ahead of human rights," said the travel manager whose company dropped and then reinstated Uber. "The majority of people want to do the right thing as long as they know what it is." But the buyer acknowledged having no best practice precedents to make this aspiration a reality. "It's something we need to look at collectively," the travel manager said. "We have a supplier performance program where we check their financial and performance records, but we don't check their human rights record. That's something we should be looking at, but we also need to work as an industry on what the right questions are and how we decipher the answers we receive."
Travel managers, in addition to looking to each other, need help from their employers. "Organizations should have an overarching position on where they are with ethics," said Carolyn Pearson, CEO of Maiden Voyage, an organization specializing in safety for diverse travelers. "It's not limited to procurement and certainly not just travel procurement."
Another source is global ethics protocols. Amnesty's ethical business strategy starts with the United Nations' Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, published in 2011. It states: "The responsibility to respect human rights requires that business enterprises: (a) Avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts through their own activities, and address such impacts when they occur; (b) Seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts."
As one kind of business relationship the document lists an organization's relationships with "entities in its value chain," though an organization also must consider proportion, the severity of impact. The principles also state, "Business enterprises need to strive for coherence between their responsibility to respect human rights and policies and procedures that govern their wider business activities and relationships. This should include, for example, policies and procedures that set financial and other performance incentives for ... procurement practices."
In the context of business travel, Frankental's interpretation is that, rather than boycotting suppliers based on owners' stances, an ethical approach would worry first about travel suppliers with human rights questions of their own. Amnesty, for example, has challenged commercial airlines that have flown deported asylum seekers out of the U.K. accompanied by private security guards who are ill-trained in restraint techniques.
"Labor rights would also be a more direct issue, such as the condition of workers building the hotels your travelers are staying in," said Frankental. The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has published allegations of sustained failures to protect migrant labor in the hotel industry in the UAE and Qatar, where workers regularly die in the construction of buildings. These countries' kafala, or sponsorship system for controlling migrant workers, allows employers to retain employees' passports, and there are numerous reports of withholding paychecks and of employees permanently indebted for the cost of arranging contracts, visas and travel. Another campaign group, Human Rights Watch, has alleged that leaving a job without permission in some Gulf states can mean fines, prison or deportation for "absconding."
Although Qatar and the UAE have introduced some legal reforms over the past couple of years, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre alleges that employers often overlook these reforms in practice. Abuses continue, the center said, passing the buck for responsibility among brands, property owners and labor contractors.
Frankental urged travel buyers to make themselves aware of other potential abuses. He pointed to Sri Lanka, which, following the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, developed tourism on coastal land previously leased to local populations. Another issue, he said, is hotels using "water supplies that have an impact because they are not available for irrigation of crops or local people. If a company benefits from human rights violations, then that would be seen as being complicit. You have a responsibility to do your own due diligence with regard to how travel activities might relate to human rights abuses. Just by asking questions of hotels about how they treat their migrant workers, you are making a statement that this is an issue."
At a travel agency conference in Australia this year, Karsten Horne, CEO of travel management company Reho Travel, suggested agents should ask hotels how they give back to local communities and whether they offer fair pay structures and opportunities for all employees. "Imagine the effect that would have on companies wanting to be selected as preferred suppliers," he said.
Reho is the only TMC in the world to be certified by B Corporation, an organization that recognizes companies that "meet higher standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability." Reho's progressive practices include investing 10 percent of its profits in a community bank in Malawi that makes small, affordable loans. Horne acknowledged that Reho received B Corp. accreditation mainly for "the way we're running a business that happens to be a travel business." He is also acutely aware that running an ethically conscious travel company is fraught with moral complexity. "If you start picking at it, you'd probably rule out half the world," said Horne. "It gets hard. There's no doubt we're going to contradict ourselves."
Reho joined several travel agencies in a boycott of Royal Brunei Airlines, but, said Horne, "we also look at opportunities to support an airline or hotel doing good things—for example, a hotel offering [transportation] in electric cars. We would like to see an industry where customers are choosing an airline for its low fuel consumption or a hotel in the developing world for its labor practices."
Over at Oerlikon, Pacheco has taken two important practical steps, including one advocated by Horne. "We have started including human rights questions in RFPs this year, such as asking the supplier what it does to accommodate the needs of minority populations. I'm curious to see what the answers will look like. It raises awareness with suppliers that this is important." The second, he said: "You should respect your travelers if they want to boycott a hotel. We give flexibility to employees to decide according to their conscience."
By his own admission, Pacheco is only in the foothills of figuring out how, as a buyer, he can engage with human rights issues, but he has made a start. Will more travel managers follow? In Dunne's view, they will have to. "People will increasingly take a look at companies' supply chains, and businesses are going to have to pay attention to corporate social responsibility in a way that will no longer just be lip service, especially if they want to attract young talent. A generation is coming through which is concerned about the behavior of the brands they are joining, not just how much money they are paid. People want to work for companies that are responsible, and that includes being more mindful of what they are buying."
Protect Your Travelers' Human Rights
Business travelers' human rights, and indeed their safety and liberty, could be compromised when they visit countries that discriminate on sexuality, gender, ethnicity or religion. Awareness of this risk is low, according to Maiden Voyage CEO Carolyn Pearson. "I'm astonished at the number of travel professionals who aren't aware of the countries in which homosexuality is illegal or even punishable by death," she said. For Pearson, the key to safeguarding travelers is for companies to educate themselves and then their travelers about risks from discriminatory attitudes. The next steps are to allow employees not to travel, and, equally important, to make it clear there will be no adverse consequences for declining.
"Some companies won't allow their travelers to avoid destinations even though the risk to them is increased," said Pearson. "Organizations should let it be known that if employees have concerns, they don't have to go. There may be people who don't want to visit countries because of the way they treat women. In some parts of the Middle East, if you are subjected to sexual assault, you could be imprisoned for it. Female business travelers aren't necessarily voicing those concerns because they have fought hard to win promotions and may think this is another reason for employers not to give them those opportunities. I believe some travel managers don't have any inkling of these concerns."
One who is aware is Oerlikon global category leader for travel, logistics and professional services Jafles Pacheco. "Travelers have approached me or human resources asking if it's safe. There has to be a discussion between the traveler, the head of health and safety for that business, HR and their line manager. A group decision is taken about incurring that risk. We will explain about taking care if they do go or give them the opportunity not to travel." The same right to refuse also exists at Care USA, a charity for which avoiding countries with discriminatory attitudes is nigh on impossible. "It's challenging because we work in 93 countries to achieve our mission of saving lives, defeating poverty and achieving social justice," said travel and administrative services manager Ellen Moens. "Individual staff can choose not to travel to any country. Duty of care procedures are in place to support our travelers globally."