Risk and the female traveller
Do travel programmes need female-specific policies?
at a GBTA confer- ence session in Boston on risk management for female travellers. It cited Maiden Voyage research showing 77 per cent of female business travellers say their firm’s travel programmes should take account of their specific needs, and a Quaynote finding that only 5 per cent of female travellers had received female-specific safety training. Cindy Heston, director of travel and events at US health insur- ance firm Anthem, told the conference her programme includes
group senior manager – assistance travel, International SOS
mainly because a lot of them don’t want to be singled out. If you’re going to draw up a policy just for females, what are you going to do about LGBT travellers? I’m gay and a travel manager, and I have to look at my risk when I go to certain countries, and for females it’s the same. You should be assessing the risk with your security team or organisations such as International SOS to map out a risk mitigation matrix. Before I joined International SOS, I implemented a female e-learning course for an oil and gas company. I did the course before I launched it to understand the information it was giving. There were some valid points for females but you could have given those points to any first-time travellers. When we launched the course, a lot of the females who had travelled extensively asked why we were singling them out when they went through the same process and channels as the male travellers. It’s difficult enough to manage your travel policy as it is, never mind complicating it by singling out females. Within the oil and gas industry, there are definitely more males but there are also a lot of females going offshore. In the corporate world of International SOS, I have huge numbers of female travellers and if I were to tell some of them that we had decided to do something to single them out, it would not be well received because they travel just as much as the guys do and have their wits about them.
engaging travellers in online training sessions before visiting certain destinations, plus an international cultural programme of local mentors who volunteer to meet up with visiting travellers and give them the lowdown on the local scene. However, BBT’s experts generally do not seem keen on separate risk policies for women. They say women do not want to be dif- ferentiated. Where their requirements are different from men’s – thanks to the culture of the destination – this can be handled by a security briefing from the relevant party.
COO, Redfern Travel
regardless of gender because there is clearly some risk involved in travelling, whoever you are. But for us the differential is around vulnerability and risk perception, rather than actual, measurable risk. I speak as a lone female traveller, something I’m usually more than happy to be; it affords me private time with my Kindle, my emails and I get some early nights that I don’t seem to manage at home. I never leave home with any trepidation and I don’t perceive risk until a moment, which happens on nearly every trip, when I have a feeling of vulnerability. It’s more about being mindful and it is different for men and women. It is about giving women
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