Business travel comes with many unforeseen risks. From unexpected natural disasters that delay flights and lead to airport chaos to local disruptions such as political unrest and civilian protests that arise with little warning, organizations have to work hard in order to provide proper duty of care to their people. In a world with an increasingly complex and ever-changing geopolitical landscape, this task is becoming both more challenging and more critical to an organization’s success than ever before.

In 2023, Berkley Accident and Health surveyed 1,000 U.S. business travelers and found most employees believe their company should protect them during trips. Many feel unprepared for emergencies like accidents, illnesses, or safety issues, highlighting the need for proactive travel risk management strategies. For small, overstretched security teams, managing multiple travelers and locations can be overwhelming. Leveraging corporate travel management tools with real-time data and intelligence is the most effective way to vet locations, minimize risk, and maintain operational continuity.

Limitations of Traditional Approaches: A Reactive Response

Traditional travel risk management systems often rely on outdated travel advisories as a main source of intelligence, such as government-issued travel warnings that are broadcasted well after the event has been underway. Or they center around manual processes that take team members hours of valuable time to complete. Neither of these tactics provide timely, relevant information, leaving travelers and their at-home security team counterparts in the dark.

These traditional systems also typically lack centralized communication and emergency protocols. Without a centralized platform, coordinating responses during a crisis becomes disjointed and inefficient, making it harder to safeguard travelers, difficult to update leadership, and requiring teams to spend crucial time tracking down approvals instead of executing plans.

Revolutionizing Security: The Power of Travel Risk Management Solutions

Fortunately, there is a better way. Travel risk management software is a tool that helps an organization’s security team stay informed, become more efficient, and arm leaders with the time-sensitive intelligence they need to make the decisions that keep people safe and operations running smoothly.

Travel risk management software is an essential tool for organizations to monitor, assess, and respond to risks in real-time and empowers organizations to shift from reactive to proactive security measures. It is a true asset to security team and can offer:

  • Proactive Risk Assessment: Travel risk management software leverages real-time data and threat intelligence to assess risks and identify potential hazards before they escalate.
  • Real-Time Monitoring: Organizations can track and monitor the safety of employees during their journeys, providing up-to-the-minute updates on the security situation.
  • Efficient Communication: Facilitate real-time, centralized communication with corporate travelers, ensuring they receive important updates or instructions during emergencies.
  • Streamlined Emergency Response: Pre-defined emergency response protocols and the ability to quickly mobilize resources or alert employees in case of disruptions.

Strengthening Traveler Security with Seerist

Seerist is a provider of travel risk management software – delivering all of the services above and more to ensure organizations have unparalleled security for their traveling workforce. Seerist also offers:

  • Real-Time Global Threat Intelligence: Access to real-time, verified, up-to-date threat information for proactive risk assessment, which empowers organizations to stay ahead of emerging security risks.
  • Risk Analysis: Automated AI-driven data analytics automatically process large amounts of data – faster than a team of humans is capable of doing – managing travel risks.
  • Duty of Care Compliance: These tools ensure organizations comply with legal and ethical responsibilities for traveler safety.
  • Location Specific Alerts: Alerts can be customized based on traveler location to ensure internal security teams remain informed about what is happening in locations of interest in real-time.

Seerist at Work: Wartsila

Wartsila, a global leader in innovative technologies and lifecycle solutions for the marine and energy markets, uses Seerist to help manage the safety of its 17,500 professionals working in more than 240 locations in 79 countries, including emerging markets and areas with varying degrees of social unrest. Wartsila chose to use Serist to access ready-made, high-quality country and regional information covering a wide variety of ongoing health and safety risks, threats, and incidents taking place around the world. Prior to this, Wartsila was unable to provide its people with the indepth information needed to prepare them to relocate for weeks or even years at a time. Due to the duration of time that employees spend in foreign locations, Wartsila needs more than just real-time data, but requires forward-looking insights and contextual expert analysis to help its team to proactively assess potential risks and threats to business travelers before a trip or long-term relocation. It’s also critical for the Wartsila team to be able to easily monitor locations for the duration of the travel experience, ensuring they are alerted ahead of shifts in stability.

The Wartsila team uses Seerist to access analysis and information on political, operations, cyber, and security risks. Specific product features that offer the biggest benefits include:

  1. Country ratings that assess risk on a scale of very low to extreme.
  2. Regional and country-level political, operational, cyber, and security analysis – baked on historical incident trends and geopolitical developments – that is broken in subcategories to provide guidance on topics such as terrorism, crime, war, and civil unrest.
  3. Scenario-based assessments on what to expect with country development, policies, military actions and more.

All of this information is powerful and truly impactful to the Wartsila security team, its employees, and operations. It allows the team to create in-depth security site plans for employees traveling to various sites – sometimes 20 pages in length. The site plans are distributed to Wartsila employees, product teams, and occasionally end customers.

With the ability to access near real-time data and forward-looking, strategic analysis that is based on predictive forecasting of disruptive or critical events, Wartsila is able to help leaders identify the best approach to topics and events. Seerist is helping the Wartsila security team work more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

Beyond Safety: Additional Benefits of Travel Risk Management Tools

Organizations leveraging a travel risk management company will not only be more successful at keeping people and operations safe, but they will likely see a rise in employee confidence and morale. Knowing that their safety is being actively monitored makes people feel better about their travel, optimizing their emotional and mental well-being, and also provides proof that leadership considers them valuable to the organization. In this scenario, employees are more likely to accept international assignments or work in challenging regions because they feel confident in their organization’s travel risk management system.

A reliable travel risk management program like Seerist will also lead to improved operational efficiency as it will provide centralized communication and streamlined risk mitigation protocols – reducing operational disruptions, and saving time and resources. If security teams are informed of potential disruptions, for example if their travel risk management solution alerts them to a potential political unrest in a city where executives are planning to travel for a meeting, the organization can proactively change the meeting destination, saving thousands of dollars annually by reducing the number of canceled or delayed trips due to early threat detection.

The Future of Travel Security: Continuous Innovation

Travel risk management solutions are evolving to provide sophisticated, predictive security solutions for organizations. By leveraging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), travel risk management systems are becoming more intuitive, more efficient, and more effective. Advances in mobile security, predictive analytics, access to historical data, and automation will only serve to deliver security teams deeper insights and smarter threat detection.

Seerist remains dedicated to maximizing all of these innovations to ensure organizations are equipped with the tools to best protect their most valuable asset—their people.

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