TROUBLESHOOTING


LAY


From natural disasters and military coups to airline strikes and rogue travellers, imposing order can be a tough job in the Wild West of travel management


DOWN THE LAW


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UTLAWS COME IN MANY FORMS in the workplace, and taming them as a mod- ern-day sheriff requires a combination of skill and wit. For most travel buyers and TMCs, trouble unfortunately rears its head on a regular basis, but the art of modern troubleshooting is to expect, anticipate and, eventually, see off any


troubling and ultimately costly issues. As Andrew Perolls, executive director of Business Travel Direct, says: “Travel disasters happen all the time, that’s just normal.” The troubleshooting spectrum is wide, from flight disruptions and managing risk to reining in employees who go “off piste” and book their own arrangements. This can have problematic consequences as Robert Howell, senior advisor of critical operations at risk management company WorldAware, points out. “We’ve had people who’ve taken self-directed trips to places they’re not supposed to go to, such as Port Harcourt in Nigeria, and when they get there they’ve realised, ‘Wow, this is a lot worse than we thought. Now we understand why we were told not to go here,’” says Howell. “They lean on us to provide safe transportation back to the airport and then we get them on a commercial flight back to Lagos.”


Sometimes the stakes are high, especially when nature intervenes, such as when the volcanic ash cloud grounded flights for weeks in 2010. Then there’s political upheaval, for example, the 2016 military coup against President Erdogan in Turkey. Perolls says that his TMC had a number of clients in Turkey on the evening of the coup when “bridges were closed and tanks rolled in” but there is a “process in place that helps you identify which of your travellers are in areas deemed as high risk”. One of Perolls’ clients, who works in manufacturing, heard about the attempted Turkish coup when out for dinner on the Friday night and a BBC news alert came through on their phone. “My first thought was that we had several employees in Turkey and my next thought


WORDS BEN WALSH 2019


MARCH/APRIL


67


ILLUSTRATIONS: BEN SOUTHAN


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