Coronavirus: Traveller safety and business stability

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At Egencia we're here to help support your business needs while minimising risk for your travellers.

We’ve listed the key information you need to help your business face the current coronavirus crisis. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact your Egencia account manager.

Leverage Traveller Tracker

• Use the Egencia Traveller Tracker to locate where your travellers are scheduled to be and view those who could potentially be at risk. You can also run a global report of all current and future travel plans in your company, regardless of destination, and search by country, by city or region, or a specific geographical area in the map.

Review your business travel policy

• Block specific air destinations: To ensure your travellers don’t take any unnecessary risks, you can either define a route / destination out of policy or block the ability to book flights to specific destinations.
• Update Egencia traveller limit: Limit the number of travellers on the same trip or flight by updating your organisation’s travel policy to mandate a maximum amount.
• Review approval settings: We know approval can slow your booking process and normally we’d encourage you to empower your travellers to book, without additional process. But in times of crisis it’s important to review how additional approval can ensure managers are aware of any planned business trips and take informed decisions accordingly. You can then revert those settings easily once the situation goes back to normal. In EMEA / APAC you can go further and add a security approver for your out of policy routes.

Update travellers’ contact information

• This ensures you can easily reach out to your travellers and their relatives in case of an incident on the road. Ask all of your travellers to review and update their Egencia profile and, most importantly, their emergency contact information.

Directly communicate with your travellers via Egencia

• Traveller messages: Choose the specific alerts you want to share on your organisation’s Egencia homepage or create contextual messages that link to specific type of bookings (air, hotel, rail or car) or travel destinations.
• Travel confirmation messaging: Create the message you want to share with travellers whenever they receive a booking confirmation.
• Highlight your company’s duty of care: Ensure your travellers have the information they need about your duty of care guidelines by adding a favourite link to your policy on your organisation’s Egencia home page. Be sure to include what processes your organisation has in place for emergency situations..
• If you don’t have specific duty of care guidelines, you can use these tips to help your travellers.

Tips to keep your travelers informed

• Promote the Egencia app: Ensure your travellers use the Egencia app while they’re on the road. The “traveller messages” you setup on your Egencia platform will appear on the app and let you deliver consistent communication. The app will also share specific alerts with your travellers, these are linked to their trips (cancellation, delays…) and give them the ability to modify their bookings if necessary.

Stay connected with the latest news To keep informed of ongoing situations, you can:

• Visit the COVID-19 help center for key updates to help you manage business travel in these challenging times, including information related to flexible travel policies.
• View Egencia travel alerts on your Egencia platform home page – our travel alerts team update them continuously.
• Opt in to receive travel alerts by email. This can be done on a user’s profile page under communication preference (for you and your travellers) or you can contact your account manager to opt in at company level.
• Join the Egencia Connect online community to connect with fellow travel managers, get the latest updates, share best practices, and more.

Improve your travel program compliance

• Another important way to make sure you fully control where your travellers are, is by ensuring they follow your recommended processes or those of your travel management company. If they don’t, you won’t be able to find out where they’re scheduled to be or feel satisfied that they’re seeing published alerts, and changes to policy.
• To help you re-communicate your travel program internally, feel free to leverage our travel manager email toolkit.
• As a benchmark, Egencia’s customers achieve over 81 percent policy compliance across air, hotel, car and rail bookings.^*

^*Data applies to global policy compliance rates of all Egencia customers, Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2018, for bookings made online, including the app.

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