Evaluating a Travel Risk Management Program

If you or your company are new to the travel risk world, the vast amount of information available and the increasing number of companies that offer travel risk services can be overwhelming. Whether your organization currently offers a travel risk management program or is looking to create one, the below advice will help when it comes to evaluating it.

Begin with what you know – your company culture.

• What policies and procedures will be accepted readily?
• What policies and procedures will you need to push from the top down?
• Does your company need to ease into a travel risk program?
• Is your leadership all-in for creating a program?

Seek out mentors, colleagues, subject matter experts, and build a network of people you trust. Be their student, be willing to ask questions, listen, and admit you don’t have all the answers. Understand upfront travel risk management is about more than travel – it’s legal, human resources, health, security, finance and much more. Include these groups from the beginning. All of the viewpoints are different, and they all need a seat at the table.

Every company is different and their approach to travel risk management will be different. Take the ideas that are a good fit for your organization and weave them together to create a cohesive program. As you do so it is important to have either an internal or external team of people to ensure the thread used to construct the program together is solid. Whether this team is an army of one or fifty, the important thing to remember is the employees, their families and the company are all counting the threads to hold when they need it.

GBTA also offers the Travel Risk Management Maturity Model™ (TRM3™), a free travel risk management evaluation which was created by some of the top travel risk management subject matter experts. Once you have completed the assessment, review the results and consider the organization’s internal acceptance and challenges of the results.

The TRM3™ is free to GBTA members and can be found here. Please contact the GBTA Risk Committee at committees@gbta.org if you have any questions.