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Follow our step-by-step guide to ensuring you know where your travellers are at all times

WITH the Corporate Manslaughter Act now in force, businesses need to pay increasing attention to their travel policies. Businesses should implement security measures to ensure that employees’ health, safety and wellbeing are met when they are out of the office.

In case of natural disasters or terrorist attacks, organisations need to have access to travel information in order to establish if employees are affected by the events, and also so they can advise those departing for the destination accordingly. Traveller tracking provides organis-ations with an overall view of its employees at any one time.

“Organisations need to have the ability to raise incident responses at the touch of the button,” says Matthew Judge, Director of The Anvil Group. Read on for his guide to sorting out this crucial issue.

STEP 1: It all starts with planning and implementing a travel policy. Employers need to ensure that each and every employee is aware of the policy and follows it when it comes to booking travel. This travel policy should outline the company’s security policy and this information should take priority in the document. The organisation needs to establish a chain of communication so that travel has an authorisation process and all parties involved are therefore kept informed.

STEP 2: Train each employee on changes to the existing travel policy and make sure all employee queries are answered. It is essential to get buy-in from every traveller and have each employee sign their copy of the policy as proof that they understand the new rules.

STEP 3: Businesses need to ensure they have technology to assist them in tracking employees. There are automated solutions in the marketplace that remove the burden of paper-based tracking or the need for an exhaustive excel spreadsheet. These traveller tracking solutions will store all travellers’ information in a central location, enabling organisations to search for employees who are on location or due to depart, should something happen that might have an impact on the health, safety and wellbeing of the traveller.

Traveller tracking solutions can be procured from ourselves and others including, International SOS, Control Risks and iJet. The latter two, plus Red24 and Fisher Travel SOS, specifically target SMEs. There are also a handful of TMCs who have their own systems, including ATP, CWT, FCm, Hillgate Travel and HRG.

STEP 4: When choosing a traveller tracking solution, customers need to ensure that it has a direct and official partnership with the all the Global Distribution Systems (GDSs), so the tracking solution will automatically know when a booking is made. Furthermore, the chosen solution needs to cater for both domestic and international travel including air, rail and hotel-only bookings – incidents can occur close to home too.

An important consideration is to ensure that the system has a built-in alerting tool that alerts employees in case of an emergency through either email or SMS messages.
How to get unbiased advice on which system to use? Network and ask your peers what system they’re using – there is nothing better than an endorsement from a happy customer. Also, check out TBTM’s feature on this subject in its March/April 2008 issue, which reviewed all systems in the marketplace.

STEP 5: Should you arrange travel through a TMC, ensure that your chosen partner is able to provide traveller tracking and crisis manage-ment services. It is fundamental that TMCs provide businesses with tools to track travellers.

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