Duty of Care Travel Tools: The HR Leader’s How-To Guide

Duty of care travel tools give HR leaders a way to locate, protect, and help employees when something goes wrong on a business trip. The legal obligation behind this concept is well established: Under OSHA, common law negligence, and ISO guidance, employers carry a responsibility to protect traveling workers from foreseeable harm, even when a travel management company is involved.

Yet many organizations still lack the systems needed to act on that obligation. This guide covers how to build a duty of care program, how to drive the platform adoption that makes it work, and ways to measure it.

The Legal Framework HR Leaders Must Understand

Several legal bases can hold an employer liable for harm to a traveling employee, and more than one can apply to a single incident: tort or negligence under common law, contractual obligations from employment agreements, and statutory requirements like the OSHA General Duty Clause.

The legal test that connects these frameworks is foreseeability. If an employer knew or should have known about a hazard and failed to act, liability may follow. This is why each component of a duty of care program maps directly to the legal standard of care.

There are two sources of obligation that deserve specific attention: domestic statutory and common law requirements rooted in OSHA, and the international standards captured in ISO guidance.

OSHA and U.S. Common Law

The OSHA General Duty Clause requires employers to provide employment free from recognized hazards likely to cause death or serious physical harm. Courts have extended the concept of “workplace” beyond fixed offices to include travel contexts. To establish a violation, OSHA must demonstrate that the employer failed to keep the workplace free of a hazard, that the hazard was recognized, that it was causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm, and that a feasible means existed to eliminate or materially reduce it.

Under common law negligence, the standard negligence test applies: duty, breach, causation, and injury. The financial exposure can be significant.

ISO Guidance and International Obligations

ISO guidance is a global benchmark for travel risk management. While it’s a voluntary standard, it may still carry legal weight. Compliance may serve as evidence of reasonable precaution in litigation. Conversely, non-compliance may be used against an employer as evidence that it fell short of a recognized industry standard of care.

For organizations with employees who travel internationally, additional statutes may apply depending on jurisdiction. HR leaders who operate across multiple jurisdictions face overlapping obligations, increasing the need for a structured duty of care program.

How to Build a Duty of Care Travel Program

A complete duty of care program follows the full process of a trip: preparing travelers before departure, monitoring risks while they’re on the move, responding if an incident occurs, and reviewing outcomes afterward.

Running that process across every trip requires cross-functional coordination. HR owns employee safety and well-being, but legal, security, and travel management each play defined roles at each stage. The sections below cover what HR leaders need to put in place.

Pre-Trip: Risk Assessment and Approval Workflows

Every trip should go through a documented risk assessment before departure. For medium- and high-risk destinations, this means a formal pre-trip approval process that evaluates health conditions, political stability, natural disaster risk, and cybersecurity threats at the destination.

Pre-trip preparation also includes providing destination-specific risk briefings, confirming travel insurance coverage, collecting next-of-kin information, and enrolling travelers in the U.S. State Department’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP). These steps help create a paper trail showing that foreseeable risks were considered, which is one of the factors courts may consider when assessing whether an employer met its duty of care.

During Travel: Tracking and Real-Time Visibility

Knowing where your travelers are at any given moment is the operational foundation of duty of care. Without timely traveler visibility, an organization may struggle to communicate with, or help, affected employees during a crisis.

Modern tools make tracking possible through live traveler maps that show employee destinations and flight details. The Navan Travel platform provides a live map that lets teams see traveling employees in real time, with visibility into traveler locations and itineraries, along with a travel impact dashboard that alerts teams to disruptions and helps them identify who may be affected. Additionally, Ava, Navan’s AI travel agent, gives travelers an always-on assistant they can turn to for itinerary changes, rebookings, and policy questions on the go, keeping interactions inside the system where they remain visible to the program.

Crisis Response: Communication and Escalation

A documented crisis communication plan should be simple enough that any traveler can follow it under stress. The core sequence looks like this:

• Contact affected travelers to confirm safety and exact location.
• Inform travelers of the situation and what the organization is doing.
• If safe, agree on actions to keep them from harm; if not safe, arrange help to move them to safety.
• Communicate with next of kin, even when the traveler is confirmed safe.
• Issue internal communication advising of the crisis and response plans.

This sequence is the same for any incident, though different people are responsible for running it. A missed check-in, a medical emergency, and an evacuation each require different decision authorities and response protocols, so tiered escalation should be defined in advance. Negotiating agreements with medical evacuation and security assistance providers before incidents occur is far more effective than scrambling during a crisis. The other operational lever is 24/7 in-house support with full traveler context. When agents already see who is traveling where and under what policies, they can resolve issues faster, no matter what time of day. And when an AI travel agent helps triage issues, human agents can focus on the cases that need them.

Post-Trip: Review and Continuous Improvement

Post-trip debriefs for high-risk travel identify what worked and what did not, which generates the kind of structured traveler feedback that organizations can use to refine protocols over time. Travelers who experienced crises may also need psychological support resources, which should be available as part of that debrief process rather than offered ad hoc. Annual policy reviews then incorporate the incident data and feedback gathered through these debriefs, closing the loop from individual trip experience to program-level improvement.

Why Platform Adoption Is Your Most Important Duty of Care Metric

Every stage of the program depends on one upstream condition: Travelers booking through the approved platform. Location tracking, disruption alerts, crisis communication, and emergency response all require itinerary data that exists only when a reservation flows through your system. 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. Each of those trips represents a traveler your organization may not be able to locate in an emergency.

Industry research consistently identifies booking outside required channels as a major compliance issue in corporate travel programs. The root cause tends to be communication failure rather than willful defiance. Employees often do not understand why using the corporate tool matters, or they may opt for a cheaper alternative and fail to recognize the safety implications.

Communicate the Safety Rationale

Employees are more likely to adopt the corporate platform when they understand the “why” behind it. Framing the requirement around duty of care, rather than cost control, gives the message weight: If employees do not book through the approved tool, the company may not be able to find them quickly in an emergency. Clear communication about preferred channels, claimable expenses, key contacts, and the reasoning behind each decision reduces the ambiguity that drives off-platform booking.

Use Incentives to Reinforce Behavior

A financial incentive for in-policy booking turns a compliance requirement into a reward. When travelers earn something directly for booking through the corporate platform, compliance becomes more self-reinforcing than grudging. Navan Rewards takes this approach by giving employees rewards they can redeem for personal travel on Navan when they book below the policy cap, encouraging the behavior that keeps them visible in the system.

The adoption also depends on the booking experience itself. Consumer-grade booking experiences, paired with conversational tools like Ava, Navan’s AI travel agent, can support higher adoption and reduce shadow booking.

The breadth of inventory has the same effect: Platforms with GDS, NDC airline connections, and OTA partnerships are better positioned to surface competitive rates and keep travelers from leaving the approved channel. In practical terms, a platform employees actually want to use is more likely to capture the itinerary data your duty of care program depends on.

How to Address Duty of Care for Every Traveler Category

A duty of care program designed only for employees on standard business trips has structural coverage gaps. Modern programs should account for the specific risk profiles of different traveler groups.

LGBTQ+ Employees in High-Risk Destinations

Some destinations may still criminalize homosexual behavior, with serious legal and personal safety consequences for travelers. For HR leaders, this is a compliance issue. Required policy elements include a global non-discrimination policy, country-specific risk ratings integrated into pre-trip approval workflows, guidelines on safe social media use in high-risk destinations, and emergency evacuation procedures that explicitly cover instances in which LGBTQ+ employees are targeted. Privacy protections for sensitive identity data are equally critical.

Excluding LGBTQ+ employees from travel opportunities to avoid risk exposure creates a separate legal liability under anti-discrimination law. The better approach is to acknowledge the risks, provide support, and let employees make informed decisions.

Solo Female Travelers and Employees With Disabilities

Both groups require vendor vetting and accommodation standards that go beyond default booking criteria, covering safety features for solo female travelers and accessibility compliance for employees with disabilities. Hotel vetting for solo female travelers should cover door security systems, guest-only access, on-site parking, and room assignment practices, while destination-specific women’s safety briefings should be a part of pre-trip preparation.

For employees with disabilities, approved vendor lists must be vetted for accessibility compliance, not just pricing. Accommodation selection should address accessibility features, proximity to medical facilities, and emergency response procedures. Excluding employees with disabilities from travel also excludes them from career development opportunities, so the program should remove barriers rather than avoid risk.

Candidates and Guest Travelers

Duty of care obligations extend to anyone traveling at the organization’s direction, including job candidates. Booking candidate travel directly, rather than reimbursing self-booked trips, gives the program the same itinerary data and support visibility it has for employees. Navan Guest Travel addresses this issue by letting recruiting teams invite candidates to book within company-defined policies. The candidate experience also signals the organization’s values, particularly to those from groups facing elevated travel risk.

How to Measure Duty of Care Program Effectiveness

A program that covers every traveler category and runs across every trip stage still needs measurement to show it’s working. Effective duty of care measurement combines proactive coverage metrics with reactive response metrics and should be tied to financial KPIs that translate the investment for executive audiences. ISO travel risk management guidance emphasizes tracking and reviewing program metrics (such as adoption, compliance, and response times) to support management oversight and continuous improvement.

The most important KPIs fall into three categories:

• Coverage: Traveler location coverage rate, program capture rate, and pre-trip risk assessment completion rate.
• Response: Incident response time and a count of proactive interventions or avoided disruptions, tracked as a trend over time.
• Satisfaction: Traveler satisfaction scores and willingness-to-travel rates, which indicate whether employees trust the program enough to accept travel assignments.

Financial KPIs are what earn executive buy-in. Cost per incident, program cost avoidance, and year-over-year insurance cost trends all translate duty of care investment into language the C-suite understands. The Skift and Navan report found that 49% of business travelers surveyed cite disruptions such as canceled flights and weather events as their top concern, giving HR leaders a data point to connect program investment to a documented employee priority.

Navan Travel connects to more than 30 HRIS platforms, including Workday and BambooHR, which helps keep employee data current as people join, change roles, or leave the organization. Stale data in travel systems creates the exact failure conditions that undermine every metric on this list.

From Legal Requirement to Organizational Priority

A duty of care travel program can help limit an organization’s legal exposure, protect its employees, and strengthen its ability to deploy talent where it matters most. The legal obligations are generally clear: Employers owe a duty of care to traveling employees, and that duty can extend across borders, even when organizations use third-party providers to help meet it.

A documented policy is the easy part. The harder work is operational, and that’s where most programs fall short. Organizations need real-time visibility into where their travelers are. They need platform adoption to make that visibility possible. Additionally, they need risk assessments, crisis communication protocols, and systems tailored to every traveler category, from senior executives to job candidates. Also, they need measurements — both to demonstrate that the program works, and to improve it over time.

The organizations that treat duty of care as a practical priority, rather than a compliance checkbox, are the ones that can respond quickly when a crisis unfolds. Start with the framework in this guide, audit your current capabilities against it, and close the gaps that could leave travelers unsupported.