There are any number of enterprise traveller tracking tools but social networks can offer a 'free' alternative, albeit without the control or integration of those offered by travel management companies and travel risk management consultancies.
Facebook, for example, has its own form of traveller tracking. Its Safety Check function is turned on when there has been a natural disaster or an attack such as those recently in Lahore, Brussels and Istanbul.
Safety Check alerts people within a certain area that an incident has occurred and asks them if they are safe. Users tap an 'I'm Safe' button which lets their Facebook network know they are okay; you can see if others in your network are too.
Many travel managers have their own tools to check where travellers are during a crisis, but it appears Facebook is a platform that travellers are naturally drawn to.
"People already turn to Facebook to check on loved ones and get updates during times like this and we created Safety Check to make these connections even easier," said Alex Schultz, vice president of growth at Facebook after the November attacks in Paris last year.
It has, however, faced some setbacks that travel managers could learn from.
This weekend Safety Check was turned on after a bomb explosion in Lahore. But a technical issue meant notifications were sent to people across the world asking if they were 'affected by the explosion'. What made this error worse was that Facebook had not mentioned a location in the words of the initial notification. So people thousands of miles away from Lahore — including Congo, Western Australia and Oklahoma - may have been concerned there had been an explosion nearby, when there hadn't.
Automated systems can go wrong, despite the best intentions of their designers. Messages sent to travellers need to be informative, concise and correct.
Facebook has also been criticised for only turning on Safety Check during certain events and not others. It's a reminder that everyone needs to be looked after equally and recognised individually from both a duty of care and personalisation perspective.
Yet Facebook's reasoning throws up another area of consideration: whether tracking is enough.
"During an ongoing crisis, like war or epidemic, Safety Check in its current form is not that useful for people: because there isn't a clear start or end point and, unfortunately, it's impossible to know when someone is truly 'safe'," said Schultz.
The providers of more traditional traveller tracking tools understand this and this is why travel managers tend not to rely on social networks.
Facebook's Safety Check may have its pitfalls but it is at least making users comfortable with using location-based technology that goes beyond showing off where people are having dinner.