Duty of Care Is More Than Traveller Tracking

Duty of care in business travel is often reduced to one question: do you know where your employees are? Traveller visibility matters, particularly during disruption, but it is only one part of a wider responsibility. A strong duty-of-care framework should help an organisation understand foreseeable risks before travel, prepare employees appropriately, maintain reasonable awareness during the journey and provide access to support when circumstances change.

The organisation also needs to know how medical, security and travel incidents will be escalated and who is responsible for coordinating the response. Duty of care is therefore not simply about knowing where a traveller is. It is about knowing how they are prepared, how they are supported and what happens when something goes wrong.

Travel Risk Management as Part of Duty of Care

A strong duty-of-care framework should be supported by a clear understanding of how travel risk is currently managed across the organisation. Policies, approval processes, traveller preparation, communication, assistance arrangements and crisis escalation often sit across different teams and systems. Without a structured review, gaps can remain hidden until an incident exposes them. Stratum’s Travel Risk Management Audit provides an independent assessment of the organisation’s existing travel risk framework, identifying strengths, weaknesses and practical priorities for improvement.

The audit can examine how travel is approved, how risk is assessed, how travellers are prepared and monitored, what assistance is available and how incidents are escalated and managed. For organisations looking to strengthen duty of care, this creates a clear baseline from which improvements can be prioritised.

Start Before the Journey Begins

Effective duty of care begins before an employee travels. The level of preparation should reflect the destination, itinerary and purpose of the journey. A short visit to a major Gulf business centre may require little more than current destination information, practical guidance and a clear support route.

A technical specialist travelling to a remote project site, an executive visiting several regional markets or an employee travelling into a more complex environment may require more detailed planning. The objective is not to introduce excessive approval processes around every trip. It is to identify the journeys that genuinely require additional attention and make sure the traveller is appropriately prepared before departure.

Assess the Journey, Not Just the Country

Country risk ratings provide useful context, but they do not explain the full exposure of an individual traveller.The practical journey matters. Airport transfers, hotels, meeting locations, road movements, project sites, border crossings and onward travel can all introduce different considerations. Two employees travelling to the same country may therefore have completely different support requirements.

One may spend two days attending meetings in central Riyadh. Another may travel several hours by road to an infrastructure project where medical access, communications and journey duration become more important. A duty-of-care framework should recognise those differences rather than relying on a single destination rating.

Traveller Preparation Should Be Proportionate

Travellers need enough information to understand the environment without being overwhelmed by it. For routine business travel, preparation may include destination guidance, entry requirements, cultural considerations and awareness of how to access support. More complex journeys may require specific briefing around movement, medical access, security conditions or contingency arrangements. The level of preparation should match the journey.

Overloading travellers with unnecessary risk information can be just as unhelpful as failing to prepare them at all. The objective is confidence and practical awareness.

Visibility During Travel

Once employees are travelling, organisations need a reasonable understanding of where people are and how they can be contacted. This becomes particularly important when a developing incident affects a city, airport or wider region. Traveller information may otherwise be fragmented between booking systems, emails, calendars and local offices.

Through Global Traveller for Organisations, employers can connect traveller information, alerts, communication and 24/7 assistance within one support structure. The aim is not continuous surveillance. It is the ability to establish who may be affected when there is a legitimate reason to do so.

Communication During Disruption

During an incident, travellers usually need concise, relevant information. They need to know whether a development affects them, whether planned movement should continue and what action, if any, is required. Long situation reports are rarely helpful to someone standing in an airport or preparing to travel across a city.

Communication should therefore be practical and specific. Where several employees are affected, organisations also need a reliable way to distribute updates and confirm that key messages have been received. Clear communication reduces uncertainty and helps avoid both overreaction and complacency.

Medical Assistance Is Part of Duty of Care

Medical incidents are among the most common problems affecting international travellers. An employee may need help finding an appropriate clinic, arranging hospital admission, communicating with an insurer or understanding what happens after discharge. In more serious cases, treatment may need to be coordinated over several days or the traveller may require medical evacuation or repatriation.

Stratum’s Middle East Medical Assistance capability supports these cases through hospital coordination, medical case management and practical support around treatment and onward movement. For employers, this provides a clear medical pathway without requiring internal travel or HR teams to navigate unfamiliar healthcare systems themselves.

Security Assistance Should Remain Practical

Security support forms another part of the duty-of-care framework. An employee may encounter civil unrest, a local incident, regional instability or another development affecting their planned journey. The correct response is not automatically to increase security measures or remove the traveller from the country. In many cases, better information, a route change or a temporary delay is sufficient.

Where more support is required, Stratum’s Business Travel Security in the Middle East capability can provide journey planning, traveller monitoring, secure ground movement and local security support. The response should be proportionate to the traveller and operating environment.

Secure Transportation and Journey Support

Ground transportation can materially affect traveller exposure. This is particularly relevant for airport transfers, inter-city movements, travel to remote sites and journeys in more complex environments. For many trips, appropriate support may simply involve a professional driver, reliable vehicle and sensible route planning.

Other journeys may require monitored movement, a security driver or additional protective measures. Stratum’s Secure Transportation in the Middle East capability provides a scalable model for these requirements. The objective is to provide the right level of movement support without over-securitising routine business travel.

Supporting Higher-Risk and Complex Travel

Some journeys require more planning. Personnel travelling to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or other complex environments may need clearer movement arrangements, local coordination, medical contingencies and alternative travel options. These journeys should sit within the same wider duty-of-care framework as routine travel, but the controls applied may be significantly different.

Stratum supports organisations travelling and operating across a range of complex Middle Eastern markets through country-specific operational capabilities and established local arrangements. This allows the organisation to maintain a consistent corporate standard while adapting the response to the actual operating environment.

Evacuation and Crisis Response

Evacuation is one of the most visible elements of duty of care, but it should not exist as an isolated plan. Organisations need to understand how travellers will be accounted for, how they will be contacted and what practical movement options may be available if commercial travel becomes constrained. The Stratum Global Risk Evacuation & Crisis Response Model connects preparedness with traveller visibility, communication and practical response capability., always with the objective that the evacuation plan should remain connected to the people it is designed to support.

Embedded Support for Larger Programmes

For organisations with substantial or ongoing regional exposure, duty of care can become too integrated with daily operations to manage entirely from a distant corporate office. An embedded security and travel risk consultant can support local risk monitoring, journey planning, traveller briefings, movement coordination and incident escalation. This can be particularly useful for major projects, new market entry or operations in more complex environments. Embedded support provides a direct link between corporate travel policy and what is actually happening on the ground.

Duty of Care Across the Middle East

The Middle East should not be managed as a single travel environment. Business travel in the UAE differs significantly from travel in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq or Lebanon. Infrastructure, healthcare access, road movement, regional exposure and local operating conditions all vary. A strong duty-of-care programme should therefore provide consistency at organisational level while allowing country-specific measures underneath it. Stratum supports organisations across the Gulf, Levant and wider Middle East through its 24/7 regional operating capability and country-level assistance network.

ISO 31030 and Travel Risk Management

ISO 31030 provides organisations with a recognised framework for managing travel risk.

It reinforces many of the practical principles that underpin effective duty of care: understanding travel exposure, establishing responsibilities, preparing travellers, maintaining communication and developing appropriate response arrangements. Stratum’s approach is aligned with these principles, while remaining focused on operational delivery rather than compliance alone. A policy has limited value if travellers cannot access meaningful support when they need it. The strongest programmes connect governance with practical capability.

Insurance Does Not Replace Duty of Care

Travel insurance remains an important form of financial protection. It does not replace the employer’s wider responsibilities toward travelling employees. Insurance may cover eligible medical treatment, disrupted travel or repatriation costs.

The organisation still needs to consider how the employee will access help, who coordinates the case and how decisions will be made if the situation becomes more complex. Assistance and insurance therefore work best as complementary parts of the wider travel programme rather than substitutes for one another.

Why Stratum Global Risk

Stratum Global Risk is a travel risk management, assistance and crisis response company supporting organisations across the region. Our approach combines preparation, traveller visibility and communication with practical medical, security and travel assistance. Support is coordinated through our 24/7 operations capability in Amman, Jordan and a wider network of regional and international providers. The result is a duty-of-care model built around the full traveller journey rather than a single piece of technology, policy or emergency service.