GUEST BLOG: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: THREE WAYS TO SUPPORT EMPLOYEES IN DISTANT DESTINATIONS

Corporate travel assignments in emerging and remote destinations can see employees facing a risky cocktail of sub-standard medical care, inadequate infrastructure and unpredictable health and security threats.

Yet, these employees expect their employers to protect them, regardless of where they are in the world.

We’ve put together three ways to do just that:

Be proactive, not reactive

Disease could be rampant, political instability brewing, or hospitals hard to access.  Cultural differences could even cause serious offence.

Employees who know the risks of a remote assignment overseas, and how to mitigate them, are less likely to get into difficulty - and more likely to feel reassured. In turn, employers will be closer to meeting their duty of care obligations.

In practice, this can mean (among other things) carrying out pre-travel medical and security risk assessments, preparing for all eventualities, and educating staff about everything from local medical care, to evacuation procedures, terrorism and incident avoidance.

It can also mean predicting and mitigating real-time threats to employees’ health and safety, once they are abroad; for example, the risk of illness to family members, adverse weather, or even a political coup.

Trust in technology

Mobile devices are multiplying faster than we are. But they are also playing an important part in preparing, informing and protecting employees working in remote areas abroad.

A mobile app can give users access to a complete online travel risk management programme, worldwide. And this can incorporate real-time medical and security intelligence and alerts, risk mitigation and integrated global assistance; all available at the swipe of a screen and tailored to destinations and needs.

By providing location-based monitoring, check-in and tracking tools, mobile technology can also give employers a birds’ eye view of their global staff and assets in relation to real-time threats; enabling them to locate and assist those in remote areas quickly, if emergency strikes. 

This sort of hand-held risk management provision can reduce the frequency and severity of emergencies overseas.

Forget fragmented assistance

A medical emergency abroad can quickly spiral out of control if the right advice is delayed, or the wrong decisions made. And no more so than in a remote or emerging destination, where low-grade medical provision can soon turn an accident or illness into an emergency.

The “golden hour” after an incident can be crucial. Leave it any longer to help an employee in difficulty and it may be too late. But, what if real-time security threats need to be gauged before an ambulance sets off? If secure transport and armed escorts are the only way to get a patient to hospital?  Or if a natural disaster has made the route to a medical facility dangerous?

In these cases, a fragmented medical and security assistance supply chain and lack of incident planning could delay responses. And, it’s not just employees who suffer. Employers could find themselves providing inefficient and complex emergency responses that are unnecessarily costly.

Some health and security risks in remote and emerging destinations

·      Road traffic accidents

·      Limited or inferior medical care

·      Mosquito-borne diseases

·      Unsafe tap water

·      Heat-related illnesses

·      Counterfeit medicines

·      Rabid dogs

·      Muggings and pickpocketing

·      Car-jacking

·      Passport theft

·      Political instability

·      Credit card cloning

·      Break-ins

This post was written by Chris Knight, head of corporate assistance services at CEGA, a Charles Taylor Company and provider of global assistance, travel risk and claims management services.

CEGA and Solace Global Risk are exhibiting their one-source medical and security assistance service Intrinsic Assistance at the Business Travel Show on February 20^th and 21^st 2019, Stand B340.  Travel bookers, buyers and managers can register for a free pass here: https://www.businesstravelshow.com/register

www.cegagroup.com       www.solaceglobal.com

GUEST BLOG: Managing travellers concerns

ABTA launched its FCO online training in conjunction with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) March 2018. This was in response to Members’ requests for support and guidance about how and when to raise the matter of FCO travel advice, and how to respond to difficult questions customers sometimes may have about their destination.

The training explains how to highlight FCO travel advice and answer difficult questions about destination safety using real-life examples from shop agents and call centre staff. An animation shows scenarios in which customers are enquiring about holidays to Turkey and Egypt and advises what to say. In the examples, the agent tells the customer to check the FCO advice to decide if they are comfortable travelling there.

The scenarios are focused on customers booking leisure holidays but they remain very relevant when travellers book their next trip. See comments from Emma Goodwin, a Senior Business Travel Consultant at BCD Travel:

"This short and easy course has shown me where to find FCO travel advice and how to deal with challenges when advising customers which will be a big help in my role.”

The FCO advice is part of the ABTA Code of Conduct that ensures that customers have all the important information they need before travelling. TMCs, travel agents and tour operators and their staff need to make customers aware of FCO travel advice in order to comply with the Code of Conduct. 

Since the FCO online training was launched 730 ABTA Members have completed the online training. ABTA Members can access the training on ABTA’s ‘Knowledge Zone’ at abta.com/abtaknowledgezone.

Corporate buyers, travellers look for an ABTA Member for your next trip

As booking business travel with an ABTA Member means you can have the confidence they are a reputable company that:

• Has passed ABTA’s financial fitness tests, including minimum capital requirements, balance sheet net asset strength and the provision of financial security.
• Adheres to ABTA’s Code of Conduct, so you can expect high service standards and reassurance where regulation does not exist.
• ABTA ensures Members keep up-to-speed with the latest advice, travel issues and regulatory requirements by providing access to a team of ABTA experts who are able to provide advice on key issues such as health and safety, crisis management and sustainability.

To check to see if your travel company is an ABTA Member click here

Or alternatively, come and visit the ABTA Team at stand B2304 at the Business Travel Show.

GUEST BLOG: Why 50 women in travel took to the stage at RADA

As you enter the RADA building, you immediately know you are somewhere special. Whether it’s the posters on the wall celebrating RADA alumni (a who’s who of modern day theatre and film) or just the general feel of the place, you know you are lucky to be there.

So, what brought 50 of our industry’s women to join Festive Road at RADA on a dreary Monday afternoon in January?

In 2018, we started to notice the lack of female representation on stage at key industry events. We all know there are plenty of smart women in travel, so why weren’t we hearing their voices, experiences and learnings?

There are some obvious answers. If you’re putting a panel together, you’re naturally inclined to pick those at the top of their game, the most senior people in their organisations. As with many industries, as we look up the career ladder, those tend to be male-dominated positions. Other reasons include lack of confidence and simply not having the network to know who decides who gets on stage!

But that’s really not good enough. Festive Road decided it was time to do something about it.

We recruited RADA to run a ‘Stepping Into The Spotlight’ masterclass and the results were fantastic. Delivered by Lisa Akesson, we examined how to increase our personal impact in presentation situations, how to speak with clarity and importantly how to manage nerves under stressful conditions. The transformation from the beginning to the end of the session was incredible.

So, what now? All 50 RADA Leading Ladies committed to putting these new skills to good use. We are already looking forward to seeing some of these 50 women onstage at the Business Travel Show in February. We’d also love to challenge you – if you’re putting a conference session together and looking for great stories and speakers with a professional edge, look outside of your immediate network and choose one of our RADA Leading Ladies!

This post was written by Louise Kilgannon, Principal, Festive Road. The Business Travel Show takes place 20-21 February 2019 - to secure your free place, please visit www.businesstravelshow.com/register  

GUEST BLOG: Smart Travel Expenses: Visibility and the Science of Spending

In the US, approximately $1.3 trillion is spent on business travel annually, but if you were asked exactly how much money you or your business had spent trying to win a customer, would you know? Without visibility of how much you spend on prospects, it’s easy to overspend on customers who might not convert in the long-run, and it’s interesting to see exactly how many barriers there are to visibility across most organisations.

Cloudy Skies

Most companies agree that in order to make money, you first have to spend money. Whether it’s taking prospects for dinner or flying out to visit their offices, organisations usually build up a number of expenses while building relationships with existing and potential customers.

But many businesses find it difficult to track spending when team members compromise budgets by going off-piste and booking travel and hotels via off-platform sites. Companies often have separate systems for travel booking, ticketing and expense management as well, making tracking and reconciling travel spend difficult, with travel managers struggling to plan for the future.

Travel Fatigue

Beyond lack of tracking and disparate systems, many organisations underestimate the cost of booking travel. In our personal lives, we’ve all gone to Expedia (or any travel site) and typed in a destination only to get 200 pages of results, realising after an entire evening that 90% are useless because you won’t get to where you want to go at a time that actually works.

Think about this from a business perspective: how much time and money is that costing the employee in charge of booking travel, who has to go through those results to calculate backwards to see the exact time an employee would have to leave and how long it takes to get to the airport, while also determining the best and most cost-effective way to get to a destination and back?

Too much choice is causing travel fatigue and limited visibility, making the static part of travel expenses much more expensive that we’d assume. 

Maximum Visibility

In these situations, having complete and end-to-end visibility of travel expenses is key. It’s about aligning this visibility with commercial actions and a clear outline of sales team budgets, which should enable managers to calculate ROI and see whether a client is worth the investment.

With this in mind, organisations can draw a line in the sand and decide exactly how much money they are going to spend on a given opportunity or person, and can see how much time and money has already been spent trying to win that business.  If the amount is exceeded, then approval is requested in the very same system that they would normally request a commercial discount in. 

With all of your expenditures laid out, it’s then easy to see illogical spending patterns, with some sales teams spending a large amount on small prospects. In sales, there’s a science to spending, and without it, organisations are at risk of throwing money or time towards unworthy prospects and losing control of their travel and expenses.

Business travel is an important and valuable aspect of organisations around the world, yet most still don’t have the visibility they should over expenses, or struggle to set—and stick to—budgets. This is something that, unfortunately, is only going to get harder with business and budget changes caused by Brexit.

Sales teams and finance departments need the ability to track, budget, and predict travel and expenses, in order to have peace of mind that their expenditure is warranted. In order to have a sales growing and sustainable pipeline that is thriving, not just surviving, we need to be able to apply a science to our spending, and to do this, it’s essential that we remove the obstacles to complete visibility across travel expenses.

This post was written by Eoin Landers, Head of Product and Operations, SalesTrip.To learn more about SalesTrip’s all-in-one travel and expenses platform on Salesforce, www.salestrip.com.

SalesTrip is exhibiting at Business Travel Show on 20-21 February 2019 at Olympia London - secure your free ticket now at www.businesstravelshow.com/register