The traditional boundaries of corporate travel management are dissolving. Today's volatile risk landscape—marked by geopolitical tensions, extreme weather events, health crises, and rising crime rates—has fundamentally transformed the meaning of duty of care for organizations. Companies can no longer responsibly limit their oversight to trips booked through official channels. The new reality demands complete visibility across ALL employee travel, including personal and leisure segments.
Elevated Risk and the ISO 31030 Standard
The September 2021 publication of ISO 31030 marked a watershed moment for travel risk management. This international standard doesn't just recommend best practices—it establishes clear expectations for risk assessment, pre-trip preparation, monitoring, and emergency response. Most significantly, it emphasizes the need for comprehensive itinerary and location data to enable effective duty-of-care.
Leading travel risk management firms have already reframed their approach, advocating protection for employees "wherever they are," not just during traditional business trips. This shift reflects our contemporary reality: remote work has blurred the lines between office and field, while international instability can transform any destination from safe to hazardous within hours.
Without full itinerary awareness—including segments booked outside corporate channels—organizations face dangerous blind spots. When earthquakes strike, political unrest erupts, or health emergencies unfold, partial visibility means partial protection. ISO 31030 makes clear that meeting the duty-of-care standard requires knowing where your people are, period.
Confronting the Blended-Travel Reality
The statistics are compelling: recent industry studies from Deloitte, GBTA, and Navan reveal that over 50% of business travelers took two or more blended trips in 2024 alone. "Bleisure" and the “Work-cation” aren’t emerging trends anymore—they’re mainstream business travel behavior.
Yet most travel management systems capture only a fraction of the journey. When employees extend business trips for personal time, book accommodations through Airbnb, reserve rental cars directly, or purchase flights outside official channels, these segments vanish from corporate radar. The three-day conference becomes invisible when it's bookended by a weekend city break and a visit to relatives.
This fragmentation creates risk exposure that traditional travel management tools simply cannot address. Your Beijing-based employee might officially show a Shanghai meeting on Tuesday, but miss that they arrived Saturday for sightseeing and plan to visit Nanjing afterward. When regional flooding occurs, your emergency response team lacks crucial information about actual employee whereabouts.
The Traxo Advantage: True Complete Visibility
This is where Traxo's revolutionary approach transforms duty-of-care capabilities. Unlike traditional systems that rely solely on PNRs and corporate booking channels, Traxo ingests travel data from EVERY source and in any format —email confirmations, agency booking portals, supplier websites, rooming lists. This comprehensive aggregation creates complete travel itineraries that reflect actual employee plans, not just the travel agency-booked segments.
When disaster strikes, organizations using Traxo can immediately identify all potentially affected employees in harm’s way —whether they're on official business, extending their trip personally, or traveling independently in the region. Natural disasters don't distinguish between business and leisure travel; neither should your duty-of-care solution.
For risk assessment, complete visibility enables accurate measurement of total travel exposure. Insurance providers, auditors, board members, and executive leadership teams increasingly demand this comprehensive view. Knowing that 30% of your workforce regularly extends business travel for personal time fundamentally changes risk calculations and resource allocation. This shift is also your cue for the need to adapt accordingly.
From a wellness perspective, full travel pattern insights and flight delay information seamlessly integrated by Traxo help HR and travel managers identify employees at risk of burnout, support work-life balance initiatives, and optimize travel policies based on actual behavior rather than assumptions. Understanding real travel patterns—not just approved itineraries—drives better decision-making.
Fulfilling Legal and Moral Obligations
The legal framework supporting comprehensive travel visibility is robust. The foundational duty-of-care principle, rooted in common law, extends employer responsibility beyond traditional workplace boundaries. In the United States, OSHA's General Duty Clause requires employers to maintain workplaces "free from recognized serious hazards"—increasingly interpreted to include off-site work and travel scenarios.
International guidance from organizations like the Global Interagency Security Forum explicitly notes that employer responsibilities extend to travelers, remote workers, and international assignments. Courts and regulators consistently find that "reasonable care" requires proactive risk management based on available information. Deliberately limiting visibility to official bookings while ignoring known travel patterns borders on willful blindness.
With Traxo's complete visibility, organizations demonstrate proactive safety measures, reduce liability exposure, and—most importantly—fulfill their moral obligation to protect employees wherever work takes them.
Privacy, Ethics, and Governance Excellence
Acknowledging employee privacy concerns is essential when implementing comprehensive travel tracking. Best practices demand transparency, purpose limitation, and robust governance frameworks.
Transparency means clearly communicating that personal travel data serves exclusively safety and duty-of-care purposes—not performance monitoring or surveillance. Purpose limitation ensures location data is accessed only for risk response, not routine oversight. Data minimization involves retaining information only as long as necessary for safety obligations.
Traxo supports these governance requirements through user-control settings, anonymized dashboards for pattern analysis, and flexible opt-out workflows that balance individual preferences with collective safety needs. Under GDPR and similar frameworks, organizations typically rely on "legitimate interests" as their lawful basis, conducting thorough data protection impact assessments to ensure proportionate, necessary processing.
Your Action Plan for Complete Visibility
Travel and HR leaders must act decisively to close visibility gaps:
First, audit your current coverage. What percentage of total employee travel remains invisible? Include bleisure extensions, off-channel bookings, and personal trips to work locations.
Second, implement a comprehensive visibility solution like Traxo. With Traxo you can finally capture the complete travel picture.
Third, update travel policies to explicitly address duty-of-care coverage across all travel types. Clarify expectations for itinerary submission while distinguishing financial responsibility from safety support.
Fourth, establish clear governance processes: Who accesses location data? What triggers alerts? How do you measure success through metrics like capture rates and response times?
Finally, communicate transparently with employees. Emphasize safety benefits, clarify data usage limitations, and demonstrate commitment to privacy protection while fulfilling duty-of-care obligations -- taking care to strike the right balance been employee safety and visibility.
The Path Forward
Complete travel visibility isn't about surveillance—it's about safety. As business travel continues evolving toward flexible, blended patterns, organizations must evolve their duty-of-care capabilities accordingly. Traxo's comprehensive visibility solution bridges the gap between traditional travel management and modern workforce reality, ensuring no employee falls through the cracks when a crisis strikes.
The question isn't whether to pursue complete visibility, but how quickly you can implement it. In an era where risk volatility is the norm and ISO 31030 sets the standard, partial visibility equals partial protection. Your employees deserve better. Your organization demands better. Complete visibility delivers both.
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