Managing Corporate Travel Risks and Compliance: A Practical, Human-Centered Guide

Today’s chosen theme: Managing Corporate Travel Risks and Compliance. Explore strategies, stories, and tools that balance traveler safety with regulatory rigor, helping teams move confidently while your organization stays audit-ready. Share your toughest questions and subscribe for weekly, real-world insights and checklists.

Foundations: Duty of Care, Governance, and ISO 31030

Clarify who does what: travel, security, HR, legal, tax, data privacy, and local managers. Establish a single accountable owner, cross-functional working group, and executive sponsorship. Invite readers to comment with their governance model and lessons learned from near-miss incidents.

Foundations: Duty of Care, Governance, and ISO 31030

Use ISO 31030 as a blueprint, not a buzzword. Build a risk register, control library, and measurable objectives that match your footprint. Document decisions, thresholds, and exceptions. If you’ve mapped controls differently, share your approach so others can compare.

Pre-Trip Risk Assessment and Smart Approvals

Combine country, city, and neighborhood intelligence with itinerary timing, hotel location, traveler profile, and purpose of visit. Weight risks like health advisories, civil unrest, and scams. Ask readers: which signals most often change your pre-trip plan or route?

Pre-Trip Risk Assessment and Smart Approvals

Design approval workflows by risk tier, trip cost, and policy variance. Capture rationale, documents, and timestamps for audit-readiness. Flag frequent exception patterns to refine policy. Comment with one approval rule you simplified that improved both speed and compliance.

On-the-Road Safety: Monitoring, Communication, and Care

Real-Time Alerts Without Over-Surveillance

Offer opt-in location sharing, timed check-ins, and area-based alerts that respect privacy laws and traveler comfort. Define data retention and access roles. Share how your team balances safety with dignity—what settings have travelers actually adopted and trusted?

Crisis Playbooks and 24/7 Escalation

Build scenario playbooks for medical emergencies, natural disasters, theft, and sudden unrest. One client’s traveler, Maya, rerouted safely during an airport shutdown because she had a one-tap escalation number and pre-approved hotel alternates. Train, test, and time every step.

Well-Being and Fatigue Risk

Jet lag, overnight connections, and last-minute changes increase error and incident risk. Encourage realistic itineraries, rest windows, and local support. Invite readers to share their best fatigue-busting routines and how managers reinforce healthy travel norms under deadline pressure.

Enforce MFA, full-disk encryption, and mobile device management with remote wipe. Pre-load only necessary data for the trip. Provide a lost-device playbook travelers can follow under stress. Share your best rapid-response tip for recovering from a misplaced phone.

Data Protection on the Move: Devices, Wi‑Fi, and Privacy

Ethics, Expenses, and Third Parties

Define acceptable hospitality by value, context, and frequency; require pre-approval above thresholds. Train on FCPA and UK Bribery Act red flags. Encourage travelers to log awkward gift situations. Share a dilemma you faced, and we’ll workshop it in comments.

Ethics, Expenses, and Third Parties

Screen routes, airlines, and counterparties against current sanctions lists. Flag dual-use equipment, software, and data carrying restrictions. Coordinate with legal before demos or hand-carries. Subscribe for a pre-departure checklist aligned to fast-changing regulatory updates.