Most companies have a duty of care policy. Far fewer have what they need to actually fulfil it when something goes wrong.
When an employee boards a flight for a work trip, the company’s legal and ethical responsibility travels with them.
This is duty of care: the obligation to take reasonable steps to protect employees from foreseeable harm, wherever their work takes them. It does not end when the office door closes behind them. In fact, for many employees, the moment of greatest exposure is precisely when they are furthest from home, navigating unfamiliar cities, time zones, transport systems, and in some cases, genuinely unstable environments.
For HR teams, duty of care during business travel is not a niche concern. It sits at the intersection of legal compliance, employee wellbeing, and operational resilience. And in most organisations, there are more gaps in it than anyone realises, until something goes wrong.
What duty of care actually means in a legal context
The legal foundation of duty of care is straightforward: employers must take reasonable steps to prevent foreseeable harm to employees in the course of their work. Courts have consistently extended this principle beyond the physical office to any location where employees are performing work-related activities, including hotels, airports, client sites, and international destinations.
In the UK, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 sets the baseline. Employers must protect employees’ health and safety ‘so far as is reasonably practicable.’ This does not require perfection, but it does require action.
The scope of what courts consider ‘foreseeable harm’ has widened considerably in recent years. It is no longer limited to physical injury. Courts increasingly expect employers to consider mental health, medical access, personal security, and the broader environment in which employees are being asked to operate.
In over 50 countries, duty of care laws now cover business travellers. For organisations with internationally mobile workforces, this means the compliance picture is not defined by one jurisdiction. It shifts with every destination an employee visits.
The practical implication is significant. If an employee is harmed during a business trip and the company cannot demonstrate that reasonable steps were taken to assess the risks and support the traveller, the legal and reputational exposure is real.
The gap between policy and capability
Most HR teams are aware of their duty of care obligations in principle. The harder question is whether the organisation has the operational capability to fulfil them in practice, particularly when something unexpected happens at speed.
One of the greatest challenges to implementing duty of care is knowing where your employees are. This sounds basic. In organisations where employees book travel through a mix of personal accounts, consumer apps, and corporate tools, it is anything but.
Consider what a disruption scenario actually requires. A security alert is issued for a city where several employees are travelling this week. The HR or travel manager needs to know immediately: which employees are affected, what their current itineraries look like, how to reach them, and what alternatives exist. None of that is possible if the travel data is fragmented across platforms that HR does not have access to.
Leaders say the time to make crisis decisions is shrinking. Seventy-four per cent report this. But only 35% believe they can mobilise teams fast enough. That gap between recognition and capability is where duty of care breaks down, not in the policy document, but in the moment when action is required.
The five things HR teams most often overlook
1. Visibility of who is actually travelling
A travel policy only covers the trips that go through the managed channel. When employees book outside the system, even with good intentions, even within budget, those trips are invisible to HR and travel management. The company has a duty of care for every work trip, regardless of how it was booked. But it cannot fulfil that duty for trips it does not know are happening.
2. Real-time location data during disruption
Knowing that an employee is travelling to a particular city this week is not the same as knowing where they are right now when an incident occurs. Real-time visibility into traveller whereabouts, not just itinerary data from a week ago, is what makes an effective response possible.
3. Mental health and stress as part of the obligation
Mental health problems affect 78% of business travellers. Burnout, isolation, and chronic stress from frequent travel are foreseeable harms in the same way that physical safety risks are. A duty of care framework that focuses only on security and medical emergencies is incomplete. HR teams need to consider how travel loads are distributed, whether frequent travellers have genuine support, and whether employees ever feel they cannot say no to a trip.
4. Specific risks for specific employee groups
Duty of care must account for how different people in various parts of the world have different needs. This includes assessing all potential risks faced by LGBTQI employees travelling to countries where their safety may be at risk, as well as female employees who in many countries do not have the same freedoms. A generic travel risk policy that does not account for these differences is not fit for purpose.
5. The 2 a.m. problem
Emergencies do not happen during business hours. When an employee calls at 2 a.m. with a cancelled flight, a medical issue, or a safety concern, what happens? Is there a number they can call? Is there someone who already has their itinerary and knows their situation? The answer to that question defines whether duty of care is real or theoretical.
What a managed travel platform makes possible
Many of the gaps described above are not gaps in HR policy. They are gaps in data and operational infrastructure, and this is where a managed travel platform directly changes what HR can do.
When all business travel is booked through a single managed system, the foundational requirement of duty of care, knowing where your people are, is met automatically. Every trip is visible. Every itinerary is accessible. When an incident occurs, the affected employees can be identified in seconds rather than minutes or hours.
Beyond visibility, a managed platform enables proactive response. Rather than waiting for stranded employees to make contact, HR and travel managers can identify disruptions as they emerge and reach out with support before the situation deteriorates. When employees book outside corporate travel platforms, organisations lose visibility into their locations and cannot respond during emergencies. The inverse is equally true: when travel is managed centrally, response capability scales with the organisation.
Twenty-four-hour support becomes meaningful rather than nominal. When a traveller needs help outside of business hours, the person or team they reach already has their booking information, knows their company’s travel policy, and can act immediately rather than asking the traveller to repeat information they should not have to repeat while stressed and stranded.
Duty of care is also an employee retention issue
There is a dimension to this conversation that goes beyond legal compliance, and it is one that HR teams are particularly well placed to understand.
According to the International SOS Risk Outlook survey, 64% of organisations report that employee expectations for duty of care have increased. Employees who travel regularly for work increasingly expect their employer to have a credible plan for what happens if something goes wrong. When that plan is absent or unclear, it affects how people feel about business travel, and over time, how they feel about the organisation.
Frequent travellers who do not feel supported are more likely to experience burnout, more likely to push back on travel requests, and in some cases more likely to leave for a company that takes the responsibility seriously. Duty of care, in this sense, is not only a legal obligation. It is part of the employee value proposition for anyone whose role involves significant time on the road.
Where to start
For HR teams reviewing their current position, the most useful starting point is not the policy document. It is the operational question: if something happened to one of our travelling employees right now, how quickly could we respond, and what would we actually be able to do?
If the answer involves manual processes, fragmented data, or a significant time delay, the gap is in infrastructure rather than intention. A managed travel platform is not the only solution, but it is the most direct one, because it addresses the data problem at the source, from the moment a booking is made.
Duty of care does not begin when the incident happens. It begins when the trip is planned.
DIB Travel gives HR and travel management teams real-time visibility into every business trip, from booking to return, with 24/7 support and the data infrastructure to respond when it matters. Learn more at dibtravel.com
