Travel Safety Policy

After April 6th 2008 your company could be prosecuted for failing in its duty of care to staff overseas under the newly introduced Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act.

So, if you’re ever asked in court if your company has a Travel Safety Policy, the wrong answer could be devastating for your business – even with a policy in place it’s worth making sure it covers the ‘safety’ bit in sufficient detail. Research suggests that 70% of large organisations and 25% of SMEs have a travel policy – but these are almost entirely about managing money – not protecting your most valuable assets – your people.

How we can help you…

We offer two Travel safety policy options for clients.

Option 1:  Generic Policy

Planet Wise launched its travel safety policy-writing tool at the Business Travel Show in February 2008. This is a highly cost-effective off-the-shelf solution for smaller organisations that have a duty to provide a basic policy. The manual covers all the requirements of a Travel Safety Policy and will easily adapt to your current procedures. Click here for more details...

The Travel Safety Policy Manual costs £1,250.00 + vat.

Click here to register interest in more details on this option

Option 2:  Bespoke Policy

This option is ideally suited to larger organisations or where the policy needs to address different departmental needs. You’ll be visited by one of experienced consultants so they can determine your exact requirements. The content and steps included in the Generic policy are used as a basis for our consultant to write and implement your own bespoke Travel Safety Policy that fully reflects the way your business operates overseas.

The Travel Safety Policy consultancy service costs £1250.00 + vat per day with a minimum of fours days to complete each policy.  Your consultant will work directly with you to manage the process from initial evaluation to policy launch.

Generic Policy - the details

Planet Wise will be launching an electronic manual at the Business Travel Show in February to enable clients to implement their own Travel Safety Policy. It will include online functionality to enable completion via the Planet Wise website quickly, easily and cost effectively.

Step 1 Board Buy-in

Initiating a Travel safety Policy will require a director of the business to champion the process and sponsor the implementation through to launch. We provide suitable information to support board members buy in and enable the whole process to run as smoothly as possible.

Step 2 Gathering relevant information

Your policy is easy to complete but will require information to be added from around the organisation. As this is unique to your organisation we provide template questionnaires that can be emailed to relevant department managers for their completion. These include:

  • HR – Policies and procedures
  • Finance – traditional providers of the travel policy – what you can and can’t spend money on and how to report on it
  • Security (where applicable) – risk assessments and keeping safe
  • IT – policies on taking hardware overseas and protecting company data
  • Insurance – who provides the service, contact details and areas covered
  • Travel Management – be it an external provider or internal resource
  • The Traveller – Knowledge that every Traveller should know
  • Occupational Health - Immunisation requirements and record keeping, fit for travel, general staff welfare both pre and post travel

Step 3 – Policy Draft

Simply take the information provided by department heads and insert into the various paragraphs and sections included in the template. Where applicable, the inserted information will automatically build into your policy document and any areas left unchecked will be omitted.

Once complete you are then able to publish a draft of the policy, which can then be circulated to interested parties. They will need to read and agree content before a final version is published to your travellers.

Step 4 – Compliance

It is strongly recommended that all travellers are taken through the policy. This will create an audit trail should one be required in the future. It's also an opportunity to reinforce the need to comply to the policy and not travel outside of it. Planet Wise can help with this if appropriate – contact us on 0845 9000 721