The unraveling of a carefully planned itinerary. The cancellation of a flight. The inability to get in touch with the TMC or travel manager when communications are suspended. These are no longer hypothetical disruptions; these are real, active risks, as business travelers caught in the current Middle East crisis – or any other calamity – can attest.
A sense of unavoidable unpredictability, courtesy of spiraling world events, gives rise to the predicament at hand: After your travel program has planned for every reasonable contingency, there are still the Black Swans. How can your program be ready for those unknown unknowns that are truly game-changers?
Proactively planning for disruptions is no longer an option – it’s the baseline. And no single stakeholder can manage it alone, nor can any one entity really address “all the things” that can go wrong.
“Travel risk management needs to be a team sport,” advises Bruce McIndoe of McIndoe Risk Advisory. “The best proactive measure is to pull together a Travel Risk Management Council bringing the various ‘protective silos’ (such as Physical Security, Cyber, HR, Business Continuity, Legal, Compliance). Each can address the risk and response for their perspective, but the magic happens when you start looking at threats that span silos, such as a cyber threat that manifests as a physical threat or vice versa.”
Casting a Wider Duty of Care Net
This cross-functional approach is what turns duty of care from philosophy into practice, acting as a comprehensive framework that identifies potential losses, mitigation strategies and recovery policies. But without an integrated action plan, it can remain theoretical. “Duty of care is often discussed at a policy level, but it’s delivered in the details, in how quickly you can locate a traveler, rebook them, and keep them informed when everything around them is changing,” says Penny Watermeier, EVP customer success at CTM.
In today’s chaotic times, knowledge is power when it comes to duty of care. “Understanding who is at risk requires strong data,” says Julian Moro, SVP and regional security director, International SOS. “The best practice is matching expected locations, like work sites and travel itineraries, against real-time location services to confirm where employees actually are and get a true picture of exposure.”
For Amy Hunke, senior manager for travel and meetings at AMETEK, advanced knowledge is critical. “Empowering travelers with information they need to combat unforeseen issues is the best preparation,” Hunke says. “For example, encouraging them to download your company’s duty of care app, to review insurance offerings via your company, and to program your TMC and security department’s emergency numbers in your cell phone so you can easily contact for assistance.”
McIndoe agrees. “From a traveler perspective, the best investment an organization can make is to train their travelers how to maintain situational awareness and most importantly, how to be resilient,” he says.
For example, some of the questions McIndoe says travelers should ask before they set out. “Are elections or protests going on? If caught in a situation, does the traveler know the warning signals, where to shelter, or how to protect themselves if they can’t get to a shelter? Do travelers know how to use your mobile phone’s emergency service and get a text message sent with no network connection? What if your phone is broken or stolen?”
In addition, McIndoe advises travelers to have cash, emergency numbers and a color copy of their passport with them if traveling internationally. “All of these things should be in a pouch, on your person, separate from your wallet or purse.”
Operational Agility is Key
Business continuity plans aren’t “just a drill.” It’s no longer about preparing travelers for if disruptions occur; it’s about shifting organizational resources to meet disruptions when they occur. And in the midst of a crisis, maintaining operational flexibility is essential.
This often includes evaluating the threat landscape and simultaneously adjusting risk profiles based on fast-changing external circumstances. For instance, pivoting during sudden flight cancellations and airport closures, and responding with alternative ways to travel especially when employees are spread across multiple areas.
“If employees are in an affected region, the top priority of the organization is safety and security, and providing the support employees may need, whether that is sheltering in place, in-country relocation or evacuation,” says Moro. If sheltering in place, it’s important to know if your travelers have adequate shelter, water, food, communications and power – and if it will be enough to last for several hours or several days.
However, in an evacuation, precision is key. Organizations must account for all the people that need to be evacuated, and must have all their relevant information on hand (e.g., mobile number, location, passport, special needs).
“With this foundation, whether one or a hundred people, you can work on your evacuation plans,” explains McIndoe. “How will people be picked up or get to a mustering point? From whom will you secure transportation? Do you need a facilitator and/or security personnel? Where will you take these people to and do they have the appropriate travel documents (i.e., visas)?” These are burning questions that travel management teams must address.
Even then, flexibility remains critical as conditions deteriorate. “In extreme weather scenarios, such as Tropical Cyclone Alfred in Australia, travel programs relied on a combination of automation and expert human support to manage high volumes of changes while prioritizing travelers requiring urgent assistance,” says Watermeier.
“Similarly, infrastructure disruptions such as major airport outages or the recent US government shutdown, which significantly impacted TSA wait times, require rapid identification of affected travelers, along with coordinated communication and re-accommodation efforts to ensure no one is left without support,” she explains.
Emergencies and/or Black Swan events such as these often expose blind spots in travel risk programs. “In 2024, extreme weather and flooding disrupted flights and access at the Dubai airport,” says Stan Ayscue, chief commercial officer at Compass Point Assist. “While travel managers received updates from TMCs, many risk managers did not, as their intelligence sources focused more on geopolitical and security threats than weather-related risks.”
The Macro vs the Micro
At a macro level, most organizations have made meaningful progress in areas such as duty of care, evacuation planning and business continuity. “Where many still fall short is at the micro level, where disruption becomes personal and immediate,” reflects Kelly Frey, managing director at SIGMA 7 Resilience and Training. “Travelers losing access to funds, communications breaking down, or digital compromise of devices are no longer edge cases. They are recurring realities.”
These situations are often exacerbated by an overreliance on technology, online platforms and mobile apps, as well as a lack of backup payment solutions. Closing these gaps requires a deeper understanding of the limitations that travel managers and stakeholders often face.
“We’ve found that reaching a travel agent at a TMC is the most difficult in an emergency,” states Mark Ziegler, senior travel manager of global travel services at NetApp. “Travel managers must understand the capabilities and/or shortcomings of their TMCs. Knowing what the travel team can do and cannot do is paramount for any program.”
And when support systems do fracture, staying within policy is critical. “In India, a traveler cancelled her NetApp-booked car service from the airport to her hotel and took a ‘free’ taxi provided by her hotel. There was a car accident in the hotel-provided car and the employee died after being in the ICU for some time,” Zeigler recounts. “Insist that your policy include a provision that travelers must book through your TMC so that the company can know where travelers are at all times.”
Planning for disruptions for business travelers is complicated enough. However, executive travel requires a fundamentally different risk lens. “For executive travel, the primary risk is often not physical harm, but disruption to decision-making capacity and business continuity,” cautions Jennifer Milton, CEO of Compass Point Assist.
“Executive movement should be treated as a critical asset in transit, requiring enhanced visibility, tailored contingency planning, and in some cases parallel support structures such as alternative routing, immediate medical escalation pathways, or secure transport redundancies,” Milton says.
Containing the Mess
Large scale events such as the US-Iran conflict demonstrate that risk is no longer confined by geographic borders. Travelers may increasingly face exposure during geopolitical retaliation cycles, even when traveling outside conflict zones. “Most regional risks have some degree of global spillover,” Moro maintains. “Their implications can vary in severity, but in our interconnected world, companies must view regional risks as global issues.”
When spillover effects are anticipated, response plans must be broad enough to span medical, security, travel, and especially insurance functions. In this way, potential missteps can be averted, such as delays in hospital admission due to unclear guarantee of payment processes between insurer and provider, or stranding travelers during airspace closures due to lack of coordination between TMCs and insurance/assistance providers.
“In some cases, insurance coverage may be limited or nonexistent under conditions such as war risk or government advisories, as seen during the Iran conflict,” explains Ayscue. “Ultimately, risk is shared across multiple stakeholders, including the traveler, the travel manager, insurers and assistance providers. The less these groups understand how they work together, the greater the gap between an incident and an effective response.”
From an operational perspective, the most successful organizations will view travel risk as a continuous cycle rather than a series of one-off trips, and the most common failures will not revolve around large-scale evacuations but rather, from smaller breakdowns that escalate due to lack of integration between intelligence, planning, and execution.
“In today’s operating environment, the concept of the ‘intentional traveler’ is no longer optional, it is a strategic necessity,” says Frey. “Ultimately, the organizations that are best positioned for Black Swan events are those that treat travel risk as an extension of enterprise resilience.”
Black Swan’s Invisible Upside
Is there a flip side to this chaos, war and disruption in our world today? In some cases, shifting geopolitical dynamics are already recalibrating travel to different markets. “If anything, we are still seeing a rise in business as travelers (both Canadian and overseas) are less inclined to travel to the US,” observes David Kelley, general manager at the SoHo Hotel in Toronto. In fact, tensions tied to trade as well as to US-Middle East relations have driven increased business activity in markets like Canada, with some international corporate routes seeing increases closer to 30 percent.
But there is a deeper story here. While rerouted itineraries and shifting hubs may benefit some more than others, it’s important to remember the intrinsic value that business travel brings to the world. Business travel remains one of the few mechanisms capable of building trust in human relationships, and fostering empathy and cross-cultural understanding during face-to-face interactions.
As the world spins, let this serve as a reminder that in war or peace, the intentional and well-prepared business traveler is still an unmatched force for good.
