The recent terrorist attacks that are shaking Europe and the world show that it is more and more high – and how it always will be more in the future – the question of Security.
September 11, 2001 was the catalyst event for many companies, ensuring that these would introduce management procedures of the “travel risk”. Today, these early attempts – supported by technology – have evolved into critical and decisive in case of emergency strategies, such as the systematic tracking of travelers.
With a global strategy for Travel Risk Management, your company can mitigate most of the risks that business travelers and “expatriates” face abroad.

Travel Risk Management (TRM) means much more than to react quickly and effectively to events in real time. In fact, only one component of a management program of “travel risk” is reactive and is the response to incidents component. The proactive components, however, are the ones that need to be planned and – above all – put into practice before the trip. These components include your policy and your procedures, staff training and traveler tracking 24 hours a day / 7 days a week, in order to get feedback from staff on the ground. By establishing this continuous cycle process and the related training to employees, you can significantly reduce all types of risk, and not just that related to business travel.

An Organization therefore has a legal responsibility to do all that is “reasonably possible” to protect the health and safety of its employees: a safe working environment (this extends to hotels, airlines, car rental companies, etc.); provide information and instruction about the potential dangers; high monitoring conditions in any workplace (including remote locations) under your control and your management.

First, we need to define a “business trip” like “each time an employee represents his own Organization away from home, both nationally and internationally”. Whenever an employee is traveling, in fact, there are potential threats and consequent risks involved.

It is therefore necessary to identify threats, to evaluate them in relation to the profile of the traveler, to set an acceptable level of risk for the Organization and for the employee, to implement mitigation strategies to reduce threats to an acceptable level of risk, to monitor for any changes to be made to the mitigation strategy and, if something goes wrong, to be prepared to answer.

Travel Risk Management thus represents an integrated program that all Organizations should adopt, not limited simply to respond to incidents: the component of “travel risk” needs to be actively managed, especially in response to an increase in volatility resulted after the events of September 11.