Your Travel Risk Plan Looks Good on Paper. But Has It Ever Been Tested?

A travel risk plan can look comprehensive on paper.

It can contain escalation procedures, emergency contacts, communication protocols and clear responsibilities. It can sit neatly in your company’s policy library and tick all the right boxes.

But what happens when a real incident occurs?

An employee is stranded overseas. A natural disaster disrupts transport. Political unrest suddenly escalates. A traveller is injured and unable to communicate. Your usual communication channels are unavailable.

Who makes the decision?

Who contacts the traveller?

Who informs senior leadership?

Who communicates with the employee’s family?

And does everyone involved actually know what they are expected to do?

This is where having a travel risk plan and being prepared to use one become two very different things.

A policy is not the same as preparedness

Most organisations understand the importance of having a travel risk management framework.

The challenge is knowing whether that framework will work under pressure.

A document can tell people what should happen during an incident. It does not necessarily tell you whether your people can execute those procedures quickly, confidently and consistently.

That gap can remain hidden until an incident exposes it.

Teams may discover that:

• Key responsibilities were unclear

• Escalation routes were too complicated

• Contact details were out of date

• Different departments had different assumptions about who was responsible

• Employees did not know how or where to seek help

• Decision-making authority had not been clearly established

• Crisis communications had not been tested

• Important information was difficult to access when it was needed

These are not necessarily failures of the policy itself.

They are signs that the policy has not been sufficiently tested in practice.

What happens when the plan meets reality?

Real incidents rarely follow a neat sequence.

Information can be incomplete. Communications can be disrupted. Multiple employees may be affected at once. Circumstances can change rapidly and decisions may need to be made before the full picture is available.

This is why organisations need to consider more than whether they have a travel risk plan.

They need to ask whether the people responsible for activating that plan understand how it works.

For example:

An employee is travelling overseas when a major incident occurs in the region.

The traveller contacts the organisation.

What happens next?

Does the person receiving the call know who to contact?

Does the security or risk team know when the situation needs to be escalated?

Does HR understand its role?

Does senior management know when it needs to become involved?

Can the organisation establish where other employees are located?

Can it communicate with affected travellers?

And can all of this happen without wasting valuable time working out who is responsible for what?

These are the questions that testing can help answer.

Tabletop exercises reveal the gaps before a real incident does

One practical way to test a travel risk plan is through a crisis tabletop exercise.

Rather than waiting for a real incident, an organisation works through a realistic scenario with the people who would be involved in managing it.

The scenario could involve a natural disaster, civil unrest, a serious medical emergency, a missing traveller or another event relevant to the organisation’s travel profile.

Participants are presented with information as the scenario develops.

They then have to discuss what they would do.

Who takes the lead?

Who makes the decision?

Who needs to be informed?

What information is required?

How is the traveller contacted?

What happens if the original plan cannot be followed?

The objective is not to catch people out.

It is to identify where the organisation is well prepared and where improvements may be needed.

The value is in the discussion

A tabletop exercise can reveal issues that are difficult to identify from a policy review alone.

For example, a policy might state that an incident should be escalated to a particular person.

During an exercise, the organisation may discover that nobody is certain who is covering that responsibility outside normal working hours.

Or a communication procedure may look straightforward until participants realise that the person responsible for contacting travellers does not have access to the necessary information.

These discoveries are valuable because they can be addressed before a real event puts people under pressure.

The exercise can also help different teams understand how their responsibilities connect.

Travel, HR, Security, Operations, Communications, Legal and senior leadership may all have different roles during an incident.

If those roles have never been tested together, assumptions can quickly create delays.

What should organisations test?

There is no single scenario that will suit every organisation.

The right exercise should reflect the organisation’s travel profile, destinations, traveller demographics and existing risk environment.

However, useful areas to test can include:

1. Incident escalation

How quickly does an incident move from the person who first receives the information to the people responsible for managing it?

2. Decision-making

Who has authority to make critical decisions, and what happens if that person is unavailable?

3. Traveller communication

How will employees receive accurate information during a rapidly changing situation?

4. Employee accountability

Can the organisation establish which employees are in the affected area and determine whether they require assistance?

5. Internal coordination

Do the relevant departments understand their individual responsibilities and how they need to work together?

6. External support

Does the organisation know when and how to engage external travel risk, medical, security or emergency assistance?

7. Family communication

If an incident seriously affects an employee, who is responsible for communication with their emergency contact or family?

8. Business continuity

If employees cannot travel, return home or continue working as planned, what happens to the business?

Testing these areas can turn an abstract policy into a practical response capability.

Testing is not a one-off exercise

A tabletop exercise should not simply become another document in the risk management folder.

The real value comes from what happens afterwards.

Following an exercise, organisations should capture the lessons identified and turn them into clear actions.

That might mean updating contact information, clarifying responsibilities, changing escalation procedures, improving traveller communications or providing additional training.

It can also highlight areas where the organisation's wider travel risk management programme needs strengthening.

And as organisations change, their risks change too.

New destinations, new employees, new suppliers, different travel patterns and changes to internal responsibilities can all affect how an organisation should respond to an incident.

That means travel risk plans should be reviewed and tested regularly rather than treated as a document that is completed once and forgotten.

The real question is not “Do we have a plan?”

It is:

“If something happened tomorrow, would our people know exactly what to do?”

A written travel risk plan is an important foundation.

But preparedness comes from making sure the people, processes and communication channels behind that plan can work when they are needed most.

Testing gives organisations an opportunity to find the gaps while there is still time to fix them.

Because the best time to discover that your crisis response does not work is during an exercise, not during a real incident.

Is your travel risk plan ready to be tested?

Callida Freemont helps organisations strengthen their travel risk management through practical training, traveller preparedness and crisis management support.

If your organisation has a significant international traveller population, testing your response procedures can help identify gaps before they become real-world problems.

Talk to Callida Freemont about testing your travel risk response.