Cara Whitehill is chief commercial officer of data and technology specialist Traxo. Connect with her...
By now most companies are settling in for this unprecedented
new reality in the corporate travel world, having made arrangements to get
travelling employees safely home and suspended nearly all business travel for
the foreseeable future.
What comes next is anyone's guess, but in speaking with
numerous travel managers over the past week, we've heard some common themes:
Safety first
It is imperative that companies can account for all employees' travel activity
in order to assess potential Covid-19 exposure risk, for the employee as well
as family and colleagues that employee may have contact with.
This means tracing both business trips and personal trips to
high-risk areas. A recent vacation to Italy or China, for example, could have
resulted in virus exposure that your employee brings back to the office upon
return. While this level of detail may cause some heartburn for company
data-privacy teams tasked with protecting employees' personal privacy,
enlisting the help of your risk management and HR teams to determine the best
way to approach this conversation is highly recommended.
Reporting
Work with your travel management company, expense management and other
reporting partners to build a true picture of your company's recent travel
activity, as well as what was previously scheduled (and likely now cancelled),
including both on-channel and off-channel booking activity.
You will need this data handy and regularly updated to help
you manage this rapidly changing environment, including:
- Tracing employees' past travel to high-risk
areas (as noted above)
- Ensuring proper pre-trip approvals and risk
authorisations have been secured for future essential trips
- Tracking potential refunds, fee waivers and
credit balances for trips that were cancelled
- Assisting employees who are in-trip but may be
subject to travel disruptions as countries close borders and airlines suspend
service.
Many companies do this already, but most handle this on a
somewhat ad-hoc basis. Developing a repeatable process around aggregating and reconciling
this data will save considerable time and headaches, and enable much faster
responses to fluid situations.
Contingency planning
It's impossible to predict when the Covid-19 danger will pass, or what the new
normal will look like afterward. One thing is certain: business travel will
come back. The global economy depends on it. While there is a lull in active
business travel, you can use this time to plan for its return:
- Update budgets. Things may look quite a bit
different once the dust settles, so take time to work with your executive and
finance teams to understand the scope of budget available for travel over what
time period.
- Prioritise type(s) of business travel to open
first. Most companies will likely take a phased approach to restarting their
engines; giving this some advanced thought and communicating your plans across
the company will help ensure teams are aligned.
- Re-evaluate your travel risk management
strategies. What worked, and what didn't? Where did you find gaps in data or
coverage that delayed action? How would you rate your communication strategy
across the company?
- Policy and programme updates. How did your company's
travel programme perform during the crisis? Enlisting all your stakeholders,
from executive team to risk and finance to vendor partners and employees –
including both road warriors and infrequent travellers – is critical here to
determine whether enhancements should be considered for policy, tools or other
programme management resources.
In addition to the steps above, there's the most important
action: empathy. Travel suppliers, agencies and the service providers who
support corporate travel managers and the programmes and travellers they manage
are experiencing a catastrophic and unprecedented meltdown of their business in
a shockingly short time. Taking a moment to reach out and show support in
whatever form available to you can go a long way to making someone's day just a
touch less stressful.
Business travel will be back, hopefully much sooner than
later. During this time when we may be feeling a bit powerless, using this
downtime to plan for what it could and should look like when it returns is both
empowering and pragmatic.
This article first appeared on Business Travel News' US website