This week's attacks in Brussels have once again put the question of the risk to business travellers from terrorist incidents into the minds of travel managers.
The actions of the perpetrators are to be condemned by all right-minded people. The fear such incidents cause will last for a long time after Zaventem Airport and Maalbeek metro station reopen, as they inevitably will.
Looking beyond the current disruption of travel to Belgium, the issue for travel managers is how to balance risk with the necessity of travelling for business.
The first place to start is to look at the likelihood of events happening.
Our chart this week is taken from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2014 and includes information on domestic, transnational and international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes more than 140,000 cases. For each GTD incident, information is available on the date and location of the incident, the weapons used and nature of the target, the number of casualties, and-when identifiable-the group or individual responsible.
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Terrorist incidents by type, 1970-2014
Source: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2015). Global Terrorism DatabaseThe chart clearly shows a dramatic increase in the number of incidents and it is this that will be worrying travel managers.
However, as discussed by Matthew Harding of risk management consultancy Drum Cussac in our January webinar, Traveller tracking in a post-Paris world, the reality is that the vast majority of these incidents take place in war zones such as Syria and Iraq.
Although we have seen a number of incidents outside such areas increase, the likelihood of a business traveller getting killed or injured in one is still relatively small compared with the number of people travelling in any one year.
Lessons should be learned from such incidents — and new travel procedures may well be the long-term outcome of this week's events — but business travel cannot stop or we may as well give in to the terrorists now.