Managing Risk to Travelers – 5 Key Questions to Ask
As risks to corporate travelers accelerate, corporations are examining their programs to better understand whether their initiatives are sufficient to protect their travelers. Compared to fixed assets (such as office locations), travelers are mobile assets that continually move and are offline at various times during their travel. Further, and for privacy concerns, many travelers do not want their locations tracked real-time. Here are some tips and questions to ask while thinking about, and evaluating, what your corporate security team needs to successfully run a travel risk management program:
It is essential to identify these areas and then provision risk intelligence feeds that are early indicators of critical events happening near those travelers. If it is North America only, then focus on intelligence groups that have a breath of experience in North America. For certain regions of the world, such as Israel, you can source intelligence from groups with expert capabilities there. To cover multiple regions across the world, organizations usually choose multiple intelligence alert providers to support their covered geographies. It is also important to source risk intelligence vendors who can flexibly cover less frequented travel areas, as needed.
The corporate security team needs to understand whether certain regions have risks, then communicate those risks to the traveler. There are providers of geographic-specific risk and trending; these providers can readily support a travel risk management program by delivering country and region specific threats to travelers to those regions.
Since travelers are mobile assets, being able to perform situational awareness around those travelers is a difficult task. Using a map-based system, such as the TopoONE Operating Picture, risk intelligence can be overlayed real-time on the current location of a mobile asset and also where that person is expected to be in the future. In this way, corporate security teams can quickly understand who is near a critical event and also who is enroute to an area with a critical event.
Once the list of impacted travelers is known using tools and data feeds mentioned above, there are a range of ways to reach that traveler. Each organization designs their own communication modalities based upon critical event severity and will conform the communication method to the group receiving it. For example, for an emerging weather event, a corporate security team might send a Slack message to their internal facilities security team notifying them that a hurricane is approaching them in the Southeast. As the hurricane intensifies, then they might notify their entire impacted employee base via email. And then, finally, when the hurricane is within 24 hours of landfall and is projected to be significant, a mass communications message might be sent. These are examples of the range of communication modalities used by modern corporate security teams.
In many organizations, there might be one or more VIPs that are high profile. These individuals might include a founder whose name is synonymous with the brand. If these individuals were harmed while traveling, then the stock price of the organization might be impaired. Sadly, these individuals are also targets of extremism and violence. When designing a travel risk management program, these individuals will likely require a higher degree of monitoring given their profiles and monitoring might include private jet travel itineraries, car service monitoring, specialized guard services and other services. In this way, travel risk management overlaps with executive protection; it is best to coordinate the needs and willingness of your VIPs to monitor and address their safety considerations while designing your program.
The Topo.ai team will help you navigate these questions so that you can choose the right mix of intelligence alert sources and other providers to meet your program’s needs. We have a wealth of experience working with all the major intelligence alert providers and other travel risk management vendors. The great news for corporate security teams is that there are many options that can meet your needs, all of which can be seamlessly integrated into your TopoONE platform.
For more information or if you would like assistance, please contact us at info@topo.ai.