Traxo chief commercial officer Cara Whitehill offers travel management advice guidance during and beyond the Covid-19 crisis
By now most companies are settling in for this unprecedented new reality in the corporate travel world, having made arrangements to get traveling 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 canceled), 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 authorizations have been secured for future essential trips
- Tracking potential refunds, fee waivers, and credit balances for trips that were canceled
- 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.
- Prioritize 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 program updates. How did your company's travel program 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 travelers—is critical here to determine whether enhancements should be considered for policy, tools or other program 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 programs and travelers 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.