Page 16 - Best Practice in Travel Risk Management 2019 - Forum Findings

The Future of Travel Risk Forum by beTravelwise
IMPLEMENTATION: BEST PRACTICE IN ACTION
Developing TRM programs in a university, a bank and a social media company throw up different challenges.
Ensuring travellers get appropriate advice
and act on this requires a mix of strategic and tactical solutions, as demonstrated by a panel hosted by Jeremy Wilkes, beTravelwise’s LGBT+
Traveller Adviser.
Also, many don’t like taking advice from someone who has never been to a war zone. They think they know it all, she says.
In the public sector and smaller organisations, responsibility for TRM is often handed to someone doing something like managing insurance. This is the case for Anne Hudson, risk insurance manager at Northumbria University.
With 30,000 students and 2,500 staff drawn from every continent, the university has a two-step approach with routine travel questions being directed to an internet portal.
But Hudson also has the challenge of advising on travel to high-risk destinations due to the nature of what universities do. For example,
if a volcano erupts, its geographers need to get there to see it. Or where better to study global warming than visit the polar ice caps. Even conflict zones are on the agenda as researchers want to study the economic, social and political impact.
Hudson has found that academics can be difficult to help, partly because they move around between different universities that have different travel policies. Also, many don’t like taking advice from someone who has never been to a war zone. They think they know
it all, she says.
Destinations can also be a risk because the traveller is inexperienced. Her university requires students to do a work placement as part of their degree and many are sent to countries
like Tanzania and Burundi. These students
are not only working in an alien culture but it often their first trip undertaken without their families, she says.
“That said, reaching people who are not experienced is much easier than persuading experienced but complacent people to change the way they do things,” says Hudson.
The university keeps digital copies of all the advice that it provides to travellers and informs them that they are personally responsible for their health and safety. As the digital record
is reviewed by line managers and, in the case of high-risk destinations, approved by senior managers, personal information is kept to
a minimum.
Where there are potential issues due to a traveller’s political or personal orientation, embedded links to advice from third parties is included. The traveller is told to explore things
if you are part of this community and make sure you are comfortable with the situation you are going to, says Hudson.
The university is also trying to capture information from its travellers by asking for feedback. A key question is what would you say to a traveller making the same journey in the future.
For example, it had a Catch-22 situation with making money available to a traveller through an African bank because it would only release the money if the traveller had one of its bank cards. Once this issue was resolved the next traveller found that they had to visit 10 ATMs to get money out because most of the ATMs were not refilled.
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