When Travelers book outside designated channels, it can lead to Duty of Care business travel risks that many companies don’t see until something goes wrong. Learn how to mitigate risk and strengthen Traveler support.  

As a Travel Manager or Executive, you’ve built your business travel program with care, and keeping your Travelers safe is at the heart of it. Duty of Care is central to sound travel risk management. But even in well-run programs, there’s a persistent blind spot: Travelers booking outside the managed channel, often without realizing the implications for their own safety.

Maybe they’re booking through deal aggregators or directly with favorite travel brands because those options seem easier and more convenient, or because they think they’re saving the company money. When they do so, though, they aren’t just eroding the travel program’s data collection or budget visibility. They’re also creating real Duty of Care business travel risk.

These Travelers are dropping off Travel Managers’ radars. Without location data, emergency contacts and policy protection details readily available at Travel Managers’ fingertips, those Travelers then become heavily at risk. There can be huge consequences.

Let’s look at how off-channel booking creates Duty of Care business travel risks and how companies can reduce blind spots.

Key Takeaways: Duty of Care and Off-Channel Booking

• Duty of Care depends on trip visibility and travel policy compliance.
• Travelers need to understand how off-channel booking can affect their safety and support.
• Managed booking must be easy, clear and useful for Travelers.

Don’t Blame Travelers for Duty of Care Business Travel Risks 

Duty of Care works when it works—and that’s when business Travelers are actually following the policies and procedures that have been laid out for them. All too often, though, business Travelers decide to go, more or less, rogue. They decide to book business travel outside of the managed program. Then, that makes way for unmanaged business travel risk.

According to research from Deloitte and other industry organizations, even when business Travelers have access to a corporate online booking tool, they still don’t hesitate to book through other channels as well—just 49% use corporate channels exclusively.

Don’t automatically think that this is your fault, though. Off-channel bookings persist even in well-managed programs. That said, don’t blame your Travelers either. This is not a situation in which you should point fingers and hope for a resolution.

As already alluded, Travelers may be doing this because they think they’re actually helping. Maybe they think that they’re saving the company money. Perhaps they think that they’re saving time—time for more pressing tasks. Maybe they want the loyalty points or to just save a little bit of frustration. It could even be the case that some employees don’t even really consider themselves part of the “official” traveling team. They don’t think that the managed program applies to them. This can be the case with less-frequent Travelers, contractors or remote workers.

Whatever the situation, as you approach this problem, look at it as a habit you’re trying to address, not a bad behavior that you want to punish. Sure, you may know that, ultimately, these Duty of Care risks could be mitigated if Travelers were simply following direction—but they’re not deviating from the plan out of malevolence. As a leader, you can set them on the right path again.

Connect Booking Compliance to Traveler Safety 

It’s important that everyone understands the value of the existing business travel program. For busy Travelers, it can feel like yet another part of a bureaucratic system, but strive to communicate with them the risks that off-channel booking poses.

When a Travel Manager has no record of a trip, they don’t know where, when or how the Traveler is traveling. They have little ability to locate the Traveler in the event of a disruption or emergency. There’s no emergency contact protocol in place. There’s no ability to act on global risk alerts that affect the Traveler’s plans. JTB Business Travel tools such as Trip Disruption Assistance and Global Risk Monitoring only function when trips are visible within the managed program.

As such, without proper protocol, the Travel Manager scrambles in the event something goes sour. In contrast, with an organized and well-adhered-to travel program, they can approach an emergency with an information-backed strategy. 

Again, stress to Travelers that it’s not just about the Duty of Care and the legal quandary that this puts on the company. It’s also not just about making the Travel Manager’s job less or more convenient. These risks can translate to real scenarios that put Travelers’ safety in direct jeopardy.

Next Steps for Decreasing Duty of Care Business Travel Risks

Once you communicate and stress the importance of avoiding off-channel booking to Travelers, Travel Managers and Executives should also realize that off-channel booking isn’t merely a compliance issue. There could be issues with the travel program’s design.

Programs that make managed booking easy, transparent and competitively priced have lower leakage rates—which means fewer Duty of Care blind spots. The connection between booking tool adoption and Duty of Care effectiveness is direct and explicit.

So, what are your next steps?

• Audit your current booking data to estimate your off-channel booking rates
• Review whether your managed booking tool is creating unnecessary friction that drives Travelers elsewhere
• Work with a Travel Management Company to establish protocols for identifying and contacting Travelers who may have booked outside the program (for example, JTB Business Travel offers robust Duty of Care support) 

Duty of Care has never been only about crisis response. It has always been about knowing where your Travelers are before something goes wrong. Off-channel bookings are not a new problem, but the programs that treat them as a Duty of Care issue—not just a compliance issue—are the ones best positioned to protect their people and their organization when it matters most.

Northstar Travel Group is a JTB Corp company. JTB Business Travel may reference reporting or research published by Northstar; however, all commentary and recommendations in this article are independently developed.