WHO YOU
GONNA CALL?
buyingbusinesstravel.com
online rebooking, money transfers or reassurances to a distressed traveller. It’s when issues are a little trickier, more remote, unexpected or uncontrollable, involving medical and security support that problems arise. “Travel managers’ expertise does not generally lie in crisis management or incident response,” states James Wood, security director, security solutions, EMEA, at International SOS and Control Risks. This raises the question, and to steal a line from the 1984 film Ghostbusters, when real trouble is afoot: “Who you gonna call?” More often than not, it is the TMC. If it arranged the travel, then it’s a natural first port of call. “Many TMCs refer to their out-of-hours service as an emergency service. However, they don’t mean they have a crisis centre service or a terrorist incident hotline,” states Adam Knights, managing director, ATPI. “Now, this doesn’t infer that we or any other TMC
isn’t prepared to deal with the responsibility. Virtually all TMCs are doing an amazing job of reacting to these situations purely through goodwill. Yet scaling up their service and helping their clients in real emergencies is rarely part of a contract.” This is interesting to note. It’s the reason why many
TMCs now have add-on services that guarantee support in emergencies. If corporations can afford it, they hire risk management companies to handle serious inci- dents. If not, then a crisis has to be dealt with somehow.
PICKING UP THE TAB
The biggest issue when it comes to dealing with a complex traveller emergency is one of resource. The hard fact of the matter is that complex events suck in a lot of time, energy and, ultimately, money. But whose? “When we discuss this with customers, they begin to realise that relying on their TMC to step up when only contracted at highly competitive transaction fees is OK, until a major emergency occurs,” says Knights. “Then the chief executive of the client company asks what provision the travel manager had in the contract. I truly believe this is a real issue for many. “Companies are realising that if they engage with their TMC and have a discussion on this subject outside the core TMC contract costs, they can often get a good emergency solution at a competitive rate,” he explains. There are lessons to be learnt. A number of travel managers interviewed talked about clarity. Certainly, one of the things buyers learn quickly when handling an incident is that they cannot do everything themselves. It is worth thinking about what contingency you have in place, if any, and resources you would allocate.
INTERNATIONAL SOS AND
CONTROL RISKS HAS SEEN DEMAND FOR ADVICE
grow by almost l.
in the last two years 30% 800% and by in the last decade 2018 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 101
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