What is Travel Risk Management?
Travel risk management (TRM) is a comprehensive program organizations use to ensure the safety, security, and well-being of employees traveling for business. It goes beyond simple travel planning and logistics to encompass a continuous cycle of preparing, monitoring, and supporting travelers against a wide array of potential risks—from medical emergencies and transport accidents to geopolitical instability and natural disasters.
At its core, a robust TRM strategy enables an organization to fulfill its legal and moral duty of care obligations. By proactively identifying events, threats, and risks, travel security professionals can help keep employees out of harm’s way. Additionally, effective travel risk management ensures that if an unavoidable incident does arise, the organization has the immediate capability to locate, communicate with, and assist employees to mitigate the impact. This strategic approach empowers a workforce to operate globally with confidence.
Who Needs Travel Risk Management?
While often associated with operations in remote global regions and conflict zones, travel risk management is essential for any organization with a mobile workforce—regional, national or international. Whether employees are commuting between major financial hubs or visiting remote field sites, the employer bears a responsibility to anticipate challenges and ensure their safety.
Corporations with Global Footprints
For multinational businesses, frequent travel is often the engine of growth. These organizations need robust TRM programs to manage routine disruptions—like flight cancellations or petty crime—just as effectively as they manage complex crises, ensuring business resilience and workforce safety and security across all territories.
NGOs and Humanitarian Organizations
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often operate in high-risk or unstable environments where infrastructure is unreliable and local support services may be non-existent. For these groups, TRM is vital not just for safety, but for operational access, allowing aid workers to deliver services securely in volatile regions.
Educational Institutions
Post-secondary institutions face a unique duty of care challenge when managing study abroad programs and faculty research trips. TRM for this sector focuses heavily on preparing students—who may be inexperienced travelers—for health, safety, and cultural risks in foreign environments.
Government Agencies and Diplomats
Public officials and diplomatic staff face targeted security threats due to their political affiliation and access to sensitive information. For these agencies, TRM involves high-level intelligence monitoring and secure logistics to mitigate the risks of espionage, detention, or politically motivated violence.
Examples of Travel Risks
Business travelers face a dynamic spectrum of potential disruptions that can impact their health, safety, and security. These risks vary significantly depending on the destination, requiring a nuanced understanding of the local environment to ensure adequate preparation for events, threats, and risks.
Health Risks
Beyond the risk of infectious diseases or global pandemics, health risks often stem from inadequate local infrastructure. Travelers may face challenges such as lack of access to quality medical care, counterfeit medications, or environmental hazards that require immediate medical evacuation.
Security Risks
This category encompasses threats posed by human actors, ranging from common opportunistic crimes like pickpocketing and theft to more severe security incidents. High-impact risks include geopolitical upheaval, civil unrest, and kidnapping, which require specialized intelligence and response protocols.
Transportation Issues
Logistical disruptions are the most frequent source of travel friction. These include flight delays or cancellations, aviation accidents, train derailments, and road safety hazards, as infrastructure failures can leave travelers stranded.
Natural Disasters
Travelers may be exposed to sudden, force majeure events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, or volcanic eruptions. These events can instantly paralyze local infrastructure, making communication and evacuation difficult without prior planning.
Cultural and Legal Challenges
Ignorance of local laws and customs can lead to severe consequences, including fines, deportation, or detention. Risks include violating strict regulations regarding photography, social media usage, medication possession, or failing to adhere to cultural dress and behavior codes.
Emerging Trends in Travel Risk Management
The field of travel risk management is rapidly shifting from a reactive, logistics-heavy function to a proactive, people-centric discipline. As global travel increases and evolves, organizations must adapt their strategies to address new technologies, changing work patterns, and the diverse needs of their workforce.
Real-time Event, Threat, and Risk Intelligence
Gone are the days of pre-travel advisories and simply tracking itineraries. The future lies in identifying potential disruptions and detecting the earliest signs of risk. Organizations are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze vast datasets to spot potential events, threats, and risks, allowing for itinerary adjustments before a traveler even leaves for the airport.
Personalized Duty of Care
Security teams are moving away from “one-size-fits-all” advice to create personalized risk profiles that account for a traveler’s destination familiarity, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. This trend emphasizes providing specific safety guidance for LGBTQ+ travelers and women, ensuring that duty of care extends equitably to every employee regardless of destination.
The “Bleisure” and “Work from Anywhere” Shift
The blurring lines between business and leisure travel (“bleisure”) and the rise of digital nomads have complicated traditional duty of care boundaries. Organizations are now updating policies to clearly define when coverage begins and ends, ensuring clear guidelines for employees who extend work trips for vacation or choose to work remotely from high-risk locations.
Climate-Driven Disruptions
With extreme weather events becoming more frequent and severe, climate risk is becoming a central pillar of TRM. Travel risk management programs are increasingly factoring in long-term climate data to anticipate seasonal disruptions, such as wildfire seasons or intensifying hurricane patterns, that could impact traveler safety and logistics.
What is Duty of Care in Travel Risk Management?
Duty of care refers to the legal and moral obligation organizations have to ensure the safety and well-being of their employees while they are traveling for business. It requires employers to take reasonable steps to prevent harm by identifying potential events, threats, and risks and providing the necessary resources to mitigate them. A robust Travel Risk Management program is the practical application of this duty, demonstrating that the organization has actively prepared, monitored, and supported its workforce from departure to return.
Dataminr Pulse for Corporate Security provides unmatched visibility into major international events and hyperlocal risks impacting your travelers with global AI-powered real-time event, threat, and risk intelligence.
Frequently Asked Questions About Travel Risk Management
Effective travel risk management is typically a cross-functional effort. While the Chief Security Officer (CSO) or Security Director often leads the strategy, successful implementation requires close collaboration between Human Resources, Legal, and Travel Management teams to ensure comprehensive coverage and support.
Risk assessment involves analyzing a destination’s specific risk landscape—including political stability, crime rates, and health infrastructure—and weighing it against the traveler’s profile and planned activities. Best-in-class programs utilize real-time event, threat, and risk intelligence to monitor these factors continuously rather than relying on a static pre-trip report.
Yes, organizations are bound by duty of care laws which vary by jurisdiction, so it’s important to understand your local regulations. Additionally, ISO 31030 serves as the global benchmark standard, providing international guidelines for managing travel risks.
ISO 31030 is the first international standard dedicated specifically to travel risk management. It provides a comprehensive framework for organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate their TRM policies, establishing a universal best practice for keeping travelers safe.
