Travel safety a top concern

UTRECHT, Netherlands  Corporate travel managers rank traveller safety and security as important as savings and cost control, a recent survey conducted by BCD Travel finds.
Now businesses that place an increased emphasis on reducing risk can draw on a concise, step-by-step guide for creating a corporate travel risk management programme.
Travel Risk Management: Keeping Business Travellers Safe and Secure provides advice on how to involve the right people, what data to collect, how to communicate to travellers.
The paper also includes a section on how to conduct audits to keep the programme alive and relevant. And case studies demonstrate how IKEA and other companies have applied the concepts to actual situations.
Inside 10“Everyone knows on some level that business travellers face a degree of risk — particularly when traveling to an unfamiliar place where people speak another language,” said BCD Travel director of research & intelligence, Claudia Unger.
“Now an increasing number of businesses realise that they can lessen or avoid legal and financial consequences by proactively working ahead of time to reduce employee risks during a business trips.”
Conducted last November, the survey of 510 travel managers also found that traveller safety ranks in importance ahead of efficiency, traveller satisfaction, and environmental and social impact. The top three challenges to travel risk management, BCD Travel’s research finds, were a lack of:
Clearly identified ownership of travel risk in the company
Senior management support
Travel policy compliance
Other factors preventing companies from creating effective travel risk management programs include:
Uncertainty of what good travel risk management should look like
Lack of employee engagement
Data privacy concerns
Failure to share needed risk-related information
Failure to track employees and assess their risk vulnerability
“Companies of all sizes now understand that business travel risks are not confined to specific destinations,” said Torsten Kriedt, BCD Travel vice president of Corporate Intelligence and Product Planning.
“The good news is that a wide range of resources and affordable services are available to help companies meet their travel risk management obligations,” said Kriedt.
BCD Travel’s guide to travel risk management, including survey results and case studies of companies with top-notch travel risk management programs, can be downloaded from the BCD Travel Knowledge Centre under the Resources tab at bcdtravel.com.
BCD Travel is in more than 100 countries.visit 

sourced:traveldailynews.asia