Travel risk management press release

BCD Travel issues guide to building corporate travel risk management program

Travel managers rank safety and security highly

UTRECHT, Netherlands,  Feb. 25, 2015 – Corporate travel managers rank traveler 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 may draw upon a concise, step-by-step guide for creating a corporate travel risk management program. Travel Risk Management: Keeping Business Travelers Safe and Secure provides advice on how to involve the right people, what data to collect, how to communicate to travelers — and more. The paper also includes a section on how to conduct audits to keep the program alive and relevant. And case studies demonstrate how IKEA and other companies have applied the concepts to actual situations.

“Everyone knows on some level that business travelers face a degree of risk — particularly when traveling to an unfamiliar place where people speak another language,” said Claudia Unger, director of Research & Intelligence for BCD Travel. “Now an increasing number of businesses realize 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 in November of 2014, the survey of 510 travel managers also finds that traveler safety ranks in importance ahead of efficiency, traveler satisfaction, and environmental and social impact.

The top three challenges to travel risk management, BCD Travel’s research finds, are a lack of:

1. Clearly identified ownership of travel risk in the company
2. Senior management support
3. 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. “At the same time, risk management has become a board-level issue as legislation and market scrutiny set the bar for the required standard of care.”

“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. “Whether your travel program sends a handful of geologists to politically unstable regions or sends thousands of account managers and salespersons all over the world, we can provide just the right solutions needed to keep business travelers safe and secure.”

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 Center under the Resources tab at bcdtravel.com.