Business Travel During Coronavirus: 5 Things You Need to Know

For many businesses, travel is a central component of operations. And as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across North America and across the globe, organizations face a confounding dilemma: how can they balance safety and duty of care with travel when their businesses may depend upon it?

While some have already reentered the sky, American air travel remains at about 70% capacity compared with where it was a year ago.1

If your business is considering business travel again, it’s critical to account for all potential risks domestically and abroad.

Managing your travel risk during a pandemic

Organizations that feel the need to get essential business travelers back in the field need to consider the following:

1. Your U.S. passport isn’t what it used to be. In addition to the regular considerations on travel — thinking about traveler safety, security, medical care, and a developing country’s infrastructure — there’s COVID-19 to consider as well.

Review quarantine rules in the country or state you’re traveling to, and understand that your passport no longer provides automatic entry to most countries. In fact, an American passport may be a liability, either denying travers entry or demanding additional time in quarantine. In today’s volatile environment, countries have been known to change policy and their appetite for foreign travelers entering on a moment’s notice — even while you’re en route. That makes contingency planning critical.

1. Update your business travel risk management plans. Reevaluate your travel risk management policy to reflect new pandemic-related travel risks. In addition to the policy, train traveling staff on how to respond to an emergency abroad, and how to appropriately address COVID-19 hazards on the road.
2. Do you have appropriate labor redundancies back home? It’s important to consider who is traveling and what happens if they’re stranded. Should your CEO or president — or any other business-critical employee — get stuck abroad due to illness, an extended quarantine, or visa issue, who will take over back home? While you might have considered formalizing these critical operational redundancies previously, now is the time to enact them if your organization is traveling abroad.
3. Think global, act local. Leverage travel advisories from federal, state and local sources as previously, but also from the CDC, WHO, the U.S. Department of State and state-level health departments. Consider using travel tools and resources dedicated to helping organizations track a traveler’s progress via itinerary and that monitor issues as they arise.
4. “Go/ No Go” criteria and incident response plans. Reconsider your travel review process and update it to evaluate travel necessity against the backdrop of the pandemic. For instance, always determine the importance of any given trip, and if it’s worth the risk. Traditional incident response plans may not be viable during this time, so make sure to assess hospital capacity and ICU bed availability in destination areas. Remember that medical care will be more complicated — COVID-19 has already overwhelmed many local healthcare systems.