How to track employee safety on business trips

Tracking employee safety during business travel starts with two questions: Where is each traveler right now, and how fast can someone reach them? The answer typically lives in booking records, because a reservation is the most dependable record of where an employee is scheduled to be that day.

That makes traveler safety a data problem before it becomes a monitoring problem. Trips booked through one system can show up in a central location, like a map. Trips booked on consumer sites, forwarded by email, or logged in a spreadsheet may not be easily findable.

What traveler safety tracking covers

Traveler safety tracking means knowing where employees are scheduled to be, what risks they face there, and how to reach them at any time — from the moment a trip is approved until the traveler has returned home. Most of that information comes from itinerary data: flight, hotel, and rail bookings that place a person in a city on a date. Timing separates safety tracking from expense or compliance reporting. A finance team can chase a missing receipt at month-end, but a safety team needs a name and a phone number within minutes.

The work follows the trip, and each phase draws on different information:

• Pre-trip: A destination risk review, approval for higher-risk trips, a current traveler profile with emergency contacts, and a briefing on whom to call if something goes wrong.
• In-trip: A live view of who’s traveling, which flights they’re on, and where they’re staying, as well as alerts when weather, strikes, or unrest affect a destination.
• Incident response: Identify affected travelers, reach them, confirm they’re safe, and arrange rebooking, shelter, or evacuation support.

Each phase inherits the gaps of the one before it. A briefing reaches only travelers in the system that sends it, and an alert reaches only people the company knows are in the affected city. For that reason, duty of care (an employer’s responsibility for employee safety on work trips) may succeed or fail on data quality more than on any single corporate travel safety tool.

Why traveler visibility breaks down

Traveler visibility usually breaks down at the booking step, well before an emergency starts. The breakdown tends to come from a few recurring problems:

• Off-platform bookings: A hotel booked on a consumer site or an airline app may never reach the safety team’s 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.
• Itinerary drift: A rebooked flight, an extra night, or a meeting moved to another city can leave a record accurate on Monday but wrong by Wednesday.
• Fragmented data: An agency may store flights while a card program stores hotel stays. Emergency contacts may live in a separate HR system, with no shared view across these sources. During an incident, someone has to reconcile those records by hand, which costs time when a traveler most needs a call.
• Tool dependence: Safety and tracking features work only on the reservations they can read. Navan’s own corporate travel safety tools work fully only when employees book through Navan, and the same limit applies to any tool that reads from reservation data.

Booking leakage, or trips booked outside the company’s program, therefore belongs on the safety team’s agenda as much as finance’s. A trip booked outside the program may cost the company a negotiated rate, and it may also cost the safety team the only record it could use to find that employee. The six steps below show how to close these gaps.

6 steps to build a traveler safety tracking program

A traveler safety tracking program holds up under pressure when location data arrives automatically, alerts reach the right people, and everyone on the response team knows their role. The six steps below build that foundation, starting with where bookings live.

1. Centralize bookings in one system

Put every trip in one booking system, so your live map, alerts, and check-in list draw on one current record of who is traveling and where. Focus on coverage: The share of trips captured in that record limits how many travelers your team can find.

Mandates alone may not be effective. Travelers may book on consumer sites when the company tool lacks a hotel near their meeting or shows a higher fare, so the approved channel must have a robust inventory and be easy to use, as well as being required. Treat travel policy compliance as part of the safety program, and set a rule for trips booked outside the channel — for example, that employees forward their itinerary before departure, so your team has a fallback record.

Booking tools can make the compliant choice the convenient one. Navan Travel not only features a multi-source inventory, but also applies travel policy at the point of search, so it checks every booking against policy before it’s made, not after the trip.

2. Keep a live list or map of active travelers

Give your response team a live list of active travelers so “who is where right now” never requires a records search. At minimum, it should show each traveler’s current city, flight, hotel, and phone number, along with trips starting in the next day, since someone landing tomorrow may be as exposed to a developing event as someone on the ground.

Accuracy depends on the profiles behind the list. Phone numbers, managers, and emergency contacts go stale when people change roles, so connect your booking tool to your HR system and ask travelers to confirm emergency contacts before higher-risk trips.

Connecting the two systems can cut down the manual upkeep. Navan connects with more than 30 HRIS systems, including Workday, BambooHR, and ADP, and syncs policy updates automatically. On Navan’s live map, admins also see traveling employees in real time and can call a traveler with one click.

3. Set alerts for destination risk and disruption

Set destination alerts that match risk events to itineraries, so your team knows which travelers an event affects before they have to call in. Before the trip, your team should sort destinations into risk tiers and confirm coverage and emergency contacts for anyone heading to a higher-risk location. A tiered travel approval workflow can route routine trips to a manager and send higher-risk trips for an additional check.

Both kinds of risk weigh on travel programs. In GBTA’s April 2026 business travel poll of 539 travel managers, suppliers, and intermediaries, 79% of respondents cited geopolitical instability and conflict as a top travel-related risk. Travelers also feel the disruption side: 49% of business travelers surveyed by Skift and Navan for The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2026 report name disruptions as a top concern.

Alerts typically draw on government advisories and risk-intelligence providers. The system matches those alerts against itineraries, so the team can identify affected travelers by name instead of seeing only a headline. Navan’s travel impact dashboard does this for strikes, weather events, and other disruptions, flagging each upcoming event and showing how many travelers may be affected.

4. Define check-in and escalation protocols

Document check-in and escalation rules in advance, so everyone knows what to do in the first hour and responses are less likely to depend on who happens to be awake. Match check-in frequency to risk. Itinerary data is usually enough for a routine domestic trip, while a trip to a higher-risk destination might call for a check-in on arrival and at set intervals.

Escalation triggers should be specific enough that nobody debates them mid-incident. An alert that matches a traveler’s city or a missed check-in can trigger escalation. So can an unanswered incident message once a set response window has passed. For each trigger in your plan, name a primary owner and a backup in another time zone. Specify when security, HR, and senior leadership should join.

5. Communicate with travelers during an incident

Run incident communication as a two-way loop: send a short, specific message to affected travelers, track replies, and call anyone who hasn’t answered. The first message should say what happened, what the traveler should do now, whom to contact, and when the next update will arrive.

Send each message through more than one channel. Push notifications, SMS, email, and phone calls can fail in different ways, and a traveler in a crowded airport or a region with an internet outage may see only one. Keep a running list that sorts every affected traveler into groups like confirmed safe, needs help, or no response, and work the last group until it is empty.

Stranded travelers then need rebooking, a hotel, or a route out, perhaps at hours when no one in the office is working. Round-the-clock agents with full itinerary access can cover that gap. With Navan’s in-house travel support, human agents, available 24/7, use Navan’s TravelXen system to view each traveler’s itinerary, policy, and history.

6. Review the response after every incident

Hold a short review after each incident and near miss, while the details are fresh, to find where the data or process failed. Track the same few measures every time, such as:

• Time from the first alert to first contact with each affected traveler
• Time to account for every affected traveler
• Number of affected travelers missing from the booking system
• Whether each escalation trigger fired as written

For each traveler found through an email thread or a phone tree instead of the map, review why the booking stayed off-platform. If that pattern recurs, raise it with your travel team as a possible policy update.

Destination tiers need the same review, because risk levels can change faster than a policy document. In the GBTA poll cited earlier, 36% of respondents reported that geopolitical conflict had led them to re-evaluate duty-of-care policies. Fold those destination updates into your travel risk management plan, so the next approval uses current tiers.

Make traveler location a byproduct of booking

Traveler location becomes a byproduct of booking when every trip runs through one system. During an incident, your team can then use the live map, alerts, and check-ins to find and call travelers instead of searching inboxes and card statements.

To put that approach into practice, start with the leakage in your program today. Pull a list of last quarter’s off-platform trips, find out why each one happened, and fix the inventory, policy, or incentive behind it. Bringing those bookings into the system gives your duty of care program a more complete traveler list.

Navan Travel is built around this approach. It shows where employees are booked, flags disruptions with counts of affected travelers, and sends push notifications to travelers’ phones. It also integrates with risk providers such as International SOS, Crisis24, and Global Rescue, notifies travelers when airlines issue flight waivers, and connects them with in-house agents for 24/7 support.