As companies expand to more destinations around the world, travel to some of the most remote and dangerous places is becoming increasingly common. This has brought with it a bigger focus on duty of care and managing risk in unstable environmental areas or conflict hit countries.
It has been an ever-present topic among the managed travel community. At BBT we made risk our main focus at our last London forum and will be the same at our next event in Dublin.
This year alone has seen uprisings, natural disasters and terrorist threats in many popular travel destinations - Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Tunisia shootings and April’s Nepal earthquake.
Nepal
Due to the economic landscape of Nepal and the severity of the disaster many lines of communication were hit, the death toll kept rising days after the initial tremor was felt and aftershocks hindered aid relief and rescue attempts.
Many businesses would have had employees in and around the area at the time and implementing their risk management plans they hopefully had in place.
BBT spoke with travel management company Diversity Travel, which has extensive experience in working with clients in the charity, academic and not-for-profit sectors, to provide insight on what procedures they followed when news broke of the earthquake and give advice for buyers who may find themselves in situations like this in the future.
BBT also spoke to a Nepal based trekking company called Sherpa Brothers, which offers tours, expeditions and jungle safaris in the area to groups and/or solo travellers. The organisation’s managing director Mr Furbur gave BBT his account of the events as they unfolded on April 25 and explained how he worked with aid agencies and embassies to ensure his international customers could make it out of the area and home as quickly as possible. He also gives an insight into what the area is like months on from the earthquake.
Sherpa Brothers
Furber’s hometown and the base for his business is in a village called Loding. It is situated 2200m above sea level and located in the west corner of Solukhumbu district. There are around 70 homes located in Loding with agriculture the main source of income.
“On April 25, everyone in the village was busy doing their daily work but at 11:56am the earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale shook and damaged half of the homes in the village. Fortunatly the earthquake had not taken the lives of anyone in the inital quake. The aftershocks kept on coming and on May 12 another big earthquake shook the village, this time 95 per cent of the houses were damaged. Since then people in the village have been living in temporary shelter. The area's only secondary school was also badly damaged.
I had just returned to Kathmandu (around 80km west off the epicentre) from a trip with a large expedition group – 49 foreigners and 100 other Nepali staff and porters.
I was with my clients in the vehicle and as we approached our hotel and final point of the tour the earthquake hit, the car began to move and shake and people from the hotel ran out shouting and screaming. It was a horrible moment and I was very worried for my family. I tried to contact them but the mobile network was down.
I collected all my travellers together and took them to a safe open area. Some of my clients were retrning home that day so we managed to find them a vehicle and get them to the airport only to find all flights were cancelled.
Through contacts with hotels in the area we were able to get them rooms for a few nights although I was worried whether some of the places could withstand another heavy tremor. Later that day I was able to meet my wife and family. Next day I met my clients in the hotel, some of them were able to fly out and the remaining we sent to their respective embassies.
Once all my clients departured from Nepal, I volunteered to support the earthquake victims. Sherpa Brothers donated 10 tents and 10 mattress to the most earthquake affacted area in the Sindupalchok area.
We were coutineously getting aftershocks but the life of Kathmandu was starting to get back to normal. On May 12 we had another big 6.9 earthquake that hit the east side of Nepal. This earthquake damaged my village where I grew up.
Since the earthquake, there has been a lot of rumours spread by different Western news channels that Nepal is not safe to travel. This has impacted heavily on our tourism sector but in reality Nepal is safe to travel.
Obviously we lost some of our cultural monuments, hotels and trekking trails, however we still have lot of hotels that are safe and a lot of beautiful sites to see. Trekking trails like Langtang and Manasalu have been badly damaged but trails like Annapurna base camp, Gorepani poon hill, Mustang and Everest base camp trek are safe to travel. Cultural sites like Lumbini, Chitawan and Pokhara have not been affected by the earthquake.
Diversity Travel
BBT spoke with Diversity Travel’s MD Christopher Airey on his company’s procedures following the disaster.
Did you have any clients who were travelling in the area at the time? What advice/help do you give clients when disasters like this happen?
When the Nepal earthquake hit we had a total of 100 people either in Nepal or due to travel there. Our in-house emergency team received a notification of the earthquake via our Travel Risk Intelligence System (TRIS) on the day it happened.
We class an incident as level 1, 2 or 3 according to its severity. As the earthquake was categorised to be a level 1 incident, our emergency support plan (esp) team immediately instigated the Diversity Travel emergency response protocol.
Firstly, we sent an email to clients (see below) registered to receive our emergency notifications within 30 minutes of receiving the alert from TRIS. This email gave details of the incident and told clients that we would ascertain whether they had any travellers in the area, or any people planning to travel there in the next seven days. We emailed them again within two hours to inform whether or not they had any employees who may be affected in the area.
We then ran a report to find out how many of our customers were in Nepal and who was due to travel there in the next seven days.
Members of the esp team contacted those due to travel – and their travel arrangers (that were available over the weekend) – to provide support, advice and reassurance and to discuss the options regarding their planned travel, whether to rearrange or cancel.
Any insights into how Diversity was directly involved in what happened in Nepal – how you helped clients out of the area
At the time of the earthquake, some clients were in the area who wanted to leave. We took calls from these clients, some of which had reported having to sleep on the streets as their hotel was deemed too unsafe to enter. Booking flights out of Kathmandu was more of a challenge than getting seats travelling into the country. However, we did everything we could to support our clients especially given that some of them were keen to return to start raising funds in an effort to assist relief efforts in Nepal.
As you would expect, it was extremely busy. Our esp team were on hand to answer calls from travellers’ employers who were ringing to confirm the location of staff. They also regularly contacted airlines to find out if flights were operating and what their policies were on cancellations etc. As the earthquake happened at weekend, the airlines were not as quick to communicate this information.
Over the next seven days, the team contacted clients due to travel to Nepal to discuss their options. Although it was frustrating, most people we spoke to understood that there was a lack of information in the immediate aftermath and most cancelled their bookings.
Many of the clients we had in Nepal were there for a few days or a week, as opposed to aid workers who we regularly book for trips lasting a few months. This was fortunate and in many cases we advised people that they would be best to keep their original booking if it was in the next few days and many flights resumed on the Sunday after the incident.
How does Diversity get information to travel buyers on what a situation is like in areas that have been hit by disasters, beyond the normal news outlets such as BBC and CNN? What happens in situations where communications have gone down in an area?
Traditional forms of communication are difficult in natural disasters so we rely heavily on our clients to be the best source of information. We can then share it with others who are in the area or are due to travel there. Many of our clients use our employee tracking system, Pin-Point. This system provides corporate security, travel and HR departments with real-time intelligence on employees’ global locations in an intuitive map-graphic format, with live colour-coded risk ratings for each location. The Pin-Point system can also contact travellers direct by email or text message from within the system if necessary.
Our clients can log in and see at a glance where in the world their travellers are, along with regularly updated colour-coded risk ratings for those areas. The system displays reservations as soon as they are ticketed, giving travel arrangers time to perform risk assessments for employees travelling to high-risk destinations. The system is constantly updated with a travel risk information feed from 25 external monitoring agencies and will alert you if the risk rating for an area suddenly changes. You can then take immediate action – with our support and assistance - to keep your travellers safe. Using pin-point you can then contact travellers via email or text message.
As we are a specialist TMC in the charity and not-for-profit sector, many of our clients, such as Save the Children International, GOAL, Marie Stopes International and the Salvation Army are well aware of the risks associated with the areas they are travelling to. For example, many of these organisations have delivered aid and medical services to those affected by the Nepal earthquake. Intensive training minimises risks and ensures the safety of their staff. With the help of TRIS and Pin-Point we are able to work alongside our clients’ training to ensure total duty of care.
Dear all,
This is to inform you that we have received an incident alert via our travel intelligence systems about an Earthquake in Nepal. We have assessed the severity of this incident as Level 1, meaning we believe there is a high probability that our clients’ travellers will be affected.
Please be assured that we are currently giving this matter our full attention. In line with the Diversity Travel Emergency Response Plan, our emergency team is now checking our systems to ascertain whether you have any travellers in the area, or any planning to travel there in the next seven days.
We will contact you again within the next two hours to inform you whether or not you have anyone who may be affected.
In the event that you do have travellers affected, our 24-hour emergency team will immediately contact your arranger/travellers to notify them of the situation and take any action necessary to change or cancel travel arrangements.
Kind regards,
Diversity Travel
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Diversitytravel.com
Sherpabrothers.com