Every day, companies face a number of threats that could affect their operations. Examples range from natural disasters to cyber attacks. TripActions is well-positioned to respond to such threats with proactive plans in place to avoid and mitigate risks associated with any potential disruption of operations and any potential interruption in service to customers, partners and/or suppliers.
Most recently, we have seen COVID-19 impact global health, economies, and company operations worldwide. As we face continued uncertainty as a result of the coronavirus, TripActions continues to prioritize the safety, security and business continuity of our customers, partners, suppliers and employees.
TripActions’ Response Recovery team has led the company’s response to COVID-19, enabling TripActions to take the following steps to ensure business continuity and maintain our commitments to customers, partners and suppliers:
Continued rapid innovation of our product - In response to the crisis, we have continued to rapidly deploy new product features and functionality to help our customers keep their traveling employees safe, as well as prepare for when business travel resumes.
We have developed multiple tools available to our customers including:
A new coronavirus report within the Admin Dashboard that delivers critical real-time information and insight for making business and travel policy decisions.
The ability to blacklist travel by continent, country and city.
A live traveler map that shows where traveling employees are, where they’ve been over the last 14 days, and where they are headed.
Capabilities to communicate individually and en masse with traveling employees in app.
A new Travel Impact dashboard that provides real time information for travel managers / risk managers to track events in impacted markets, and take action to ensure employee safety and fulfill duty of care.
A max cancellation report that helps travel managers assess the financial impact of cancelled travel plans across their business..
As we look to the recovery from COVID-19, we will continue to roll-out new features and functionality that enable our customers to keep their traveling employees safe, informed and confident about their travel plans while controlling costs and saving money.
Reduced and refocused spending - To ensure that we maintain our business operations throughout this challenging time, we’ve taken appropriate cost-cutting steps to preserve cash and ensure that we are here for our customers, partners and suppliers long into the future as their trusted partner, including eliminating all non-essential spend and reducing our global workforce.
Driven efficiency and agility via industry-leading, cloud-based technology - Our proprietary technology and platform enables very efficient operations while providing a best-in-class experience, service and support for our customers.
Enabled contingency plans for customer support - Prior to shelter-in-place orders, we proactively enabled our Customer Support organization (TripActions Travel Agents) to work from home so that they could support our customers and their travelers remotely. We also cross-trained hundreds of our employees on the tools, policies and procedures for supporting our customers and their travelers to ensure that we were able to meet customer needs for changing and cancelling itineraries as global travel came to a halt. As a result, we are well positioned to support our users when business travel resumes.
Enhanced our focus on efficiency throughout the company - Capitalizing on travel volumes being low and building on our industry-leading efficiency, we have increased our focus on internal efficiency throughout the company so that we are even better positioned operationally going forward and as business travel resumes.
Created the TripActions Community and TripActions Office Hours - TripActions Community’s focus is to connect our global network providing a place to get insights, best practices and answers to questions from their peers around business travel continuity and corporate travel and expense (T&E) management. We’re offering TripActions Office hours bringing together this network of travel managers, finance leaders, HR leaders, and crisis and risk managers, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis via video conference calls. Both are providing input and feedback from customers on their current and future corporate travel and expense management needs for our product team.
In order to ensure that we continue to support and deliver for our customers, partners and suppliers, we also took the following actions to protect the health, safety and well-being of our own employees:
Instituted a remote workforce
- TripActions moved to work from home operations in advance of government stay-at-home measures to ensure continuation of service for our customers, partners and suppliers. Going into the COVID-19 crisis, TripActions was uniquely positioned in that all employees were able to work from home, irrespective of role/function. To accommodate working from home as a potentially longer term solution, additional peripheral hardware was provided to employees. We experienced no disruption in our work despite shifting to a remote workforce because all of our systems and tools were designed to allow for remote work.
Increased office sanitization
- All office locations are receiving a deep cleaning and will be disinfected prior to employees being allowed back onsite.
Additional equipment and practices to enhance hygiene and prevent/mitigate the spread of illnesses, including additional hand sanitizing products, are being added throughout all TripActions offices.
Restricted all corporate travel
- All exceptions are reviewed for approval by our EVP, Corporate Controller.
Cancelled and/or postponed any internal and external events
, including TripActions Connections 2020 for employees and TRAVERSE Europe 2020.
Our Response Recovery Team continues to actively monitor the COVID-19 situation and has prepared plans that will be activated once deemed appropriate to return to a steady state.
We recognize that now is the time to stand together with our fellow employees, customers, partners and suppliers despite being apart. We are focused on emerging from this global health crisis stronger than ever, together. We look forward to when we can all get back to business travel, safely. We at TripActions are here to help. Should you have any questions as it relates to the TripActions Business Continuity plan or our response to COVID-19, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.