Duty of care in travel management: A complete guide

Duty of care in travel management is the obligation to know where traveling employees are and to get help to them fast when something goes wrong. The legal basis differs by jurisdiction: negligence law in the U.S., criminal statute in the UK, and a non-delegable duty across the EU. The operational test is consistent across jurisdictions: Use assessed risk and current location information to make timely contact with a traveler.

An April 2026 poll of travel professionals found concern about employee safety while traveling climbed to 67%, up from 56% three months earlier.

What duty of care means for a corporate travel program

Duty of care is a legal obligation. ISO 31030, the international standard for travel risk management, defines it as “a moral responsibility or legal obligation of an organisation to protect the traveller from hazards and threats.” Enforcement routes exist in the U.S., the UK, and the EU, even where case law is sparse.

In the United States, the obligation is based on negligence law: If an injury to a traveling employee was reasonably foreseeable and the employer failed to take adequate precautions, the employer risks liability. In the UK, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 makes it a criminal offence to fail to protect employee health, safety, and welfare “so far as is reasonably practicable.” The EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC goes further: Engaging external services, such as a travel management company (TMC) or a security vendor, does not discharge the employer’s responsibility.

Domestic trips are covered, too. OSHA’s general duty clause requires employers to keep the workplace free of recognized hazards. An employer’s duty of care scales with exposure: a same-day domestic flight carries a lighter obligation than a multi-night stay, which also includes lodging, ground transport, and after-hours time. The obligation scales with the level of risk, and crossing a border adds local-law obligations on top of home-country duties.

Sending one employee to professionally occupied offices abroad demands far less preparation than sending a team to a remote construction site, which is why corporate travel safety practice scales with exposure.

The core components of a duty-of-care program

A duty-of-care program combines current location and risk information with two-way communication. Policy compliance supports these capabilities by supplying reliable itinerary details and a channel to reach each employee.

Real-time traveler visibility

Live booking data shows where employees are right now. A spreadsheet reflects only its last update. Manual rosters age by the hour during a disruption; a flight change or an early checkout quietly makes them inaccurate. Systems that derive positions from bookings keep those records and the tracking layer together. Navan Travel’s live map provides real-time traveler visibility and one-click calling.

Proactive disruption alerts

The most useful alert arrives early enough to help an employee adjust plans. Navan’s travel impact dashboard monitors strikes and weather disruptions and shows how many employees each event affects. Navan Travel separately supports self-service flight changes and cancellations.

Emergency communication and response

Communication has to run in both directions: The company pushes alerts and instructions, while employees check in as safe or ask for help. Research published in November 2025 found that many respondents don’t know where to find company safety information, and many aren’t sure whom to contact in an emergency. Employees should receive the response team’s contact details before departure.

Response also needs a human layer. Around-the-clock agents with full itinerary context can resolve many incidents, but complex medical or security events depend on human judgment. Those decisions often come quickly: a 2026 risk outlook found 74% of organizations report shrinking decision-making windows.

Policy compliance: Closing the off-platform gap

Reservation data powers location tracking, disruption alerts, and crisis communication. An off-platform booking can leave those systems without the itinerary details they need. The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2026, a report from Skift and Navan, found that 80% of business travelers surveyed book off-platform at least some of the time. A 2025 corporate travel study, which surveyed 1,003 business travelers, found that only 49% always use corporate booking channels, up from 43% the year before.

Employees leave the managed channel when inventory or pricing disappoints. Extra friction can do the same. Improving the booking experience is more likely to bring reservations back into view than treating adoption as a policing problem. Look at where your out-of-policy bookings cluster and you usually find the cause: a missing hotel option or a clunky approval flow. Well-built corporate travel policies remove both. Navan Travel’s policy controls restrict travel to specific locations, block low-rated hotels, and track employees in real time.

How to build a duty-of-care program step by step

A duty-of-care program turns a legal obligation into a repeatable workflow that covers pre-trip assessment, active monitoring, incident response, and review. Booking and tracking from one data source can improve vendor handoffs and guest coverage, two areas where data gaps commonly appear.

1. Map your legal exposure by jurisdiction

Start with where your employees travel, because obligations differ by destination and home jurisdiction. ISO 31030, published in 2021, gives you a structure: policy, program development, threat identification, risk assessment, and prevention and mitigation strategies. Legal teams should document which statutes apply in each operating country.

2. Set tiered pre-trip approvals

Route only itineraries that need additional review to a human approver. Blanket approval thresholds add friction to every booking, which can push employees off-platform. A tiered model automatically triggers elevated approval for U.S. State Department Level 3 and Level 4 destinations and applies rules such as limits on how many executives share one flight. Modern duty-of-care travel tools and AI tools for corporate travel safety surface advisories during booking, so the assessment happens where the decision is made.

Before departure, deliver a destination risk briefing and keep current emergency contact and next-of-kin records on file. Enroll high-risk-destination travelers in the U.S. State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program.

Those steps also create the paper trail showing foreseeable concerns were considered.

3. Close the vendor data-sharing gap

Every booking provider should send changes into one tracking layer. GBTA’s Risk Committee is blunt about this: “The booked data you have for your traveler-tracking program is only as good as the integrity of your data.” Someone who rebooks mid-trip through a regional TMC can be missing from the security team’s current map. Ask each vendor during your RFP how a change reaches the tracking layer; the same committee publishes a People Risk Management RFP Guide with categorized vendor questions for that purpose.

4. Extend coverage to guest and candidate travel

Statute is quiet on non-employee travel, so treat this as a program design choice. Candidates and contractors travel at the company’s request. Board members may do the same. Put these guests in the same visibility layer even though they sit outside the HRIS. Their arrangements often happen ad hoc over email, outside any itinerary record. Book them through the same channel your employees use so your disruption dashboard covers the whole traveling population.

5. Automate routine support so people handle escalations

Support demand spikes at exactly the moment agents are scarcest, which is why routine requests should resolve without one. Navan’s AI assistant Ava provides 24/7 support for booking changes and travel disruptions. AI can absorb the rebooking queue while your travel managers and human agents concentrate on complex cases and evacuation coordination.

6. Test the program regularly

Regularly run a drill across your active travelers. Send a test alert and measure response rates. Then time how long it takes to produce a location list. A drill measures who receives and answers the message, and the results give the team a chance to improve communication coverage. Testing those response rates before an airspace closure can support faster coordination. Close the loop after real trips with post-incident debriefs and plan revisions.

Common duty-of-care mistakes travel managers make

Here’s a list of recurring mistakes that reduce the completeness of location, communication, and response workflows:

Each row maps back to the baseline obligation defined at the top of this guide. Improve the workflow rather than focusing on the person.

Adoption is your first duty-of-care metric

The strength of your duty-of-care program depends on managed-booking coverage. Every tool reads from reservation data, while an out-of-system booking supplies no itinerary details. The same April 2026 poll that recorded rising safety concerns found that 70% of buyers say the travel management function becomes more important during periods of disruption. Start with an audit: Time how long it takes your team to produce an accurate list of every traveler in one city. If producing the list takes hours, improve the booking experience so employees choose the managed system on their own. With Navan Travel, traveler tracking comes from the booking itself.