Keeping the “black swans” of corporate travel in check

You rarely see disruption coming until it happens. I’m not talking about organisational change here – I’m thinking about far more tangible events, like getting caught up in a natural disaster or a terror threat while abroad. Or, as my newest colleague Carl recently pointed out, a sudden and sizable tax liability after spending too much time overseas. When I wrote about our duty of care to our people, I was thinking specifically in terms of physical danger, but Carl sees this as part of a far bigger picture where the more our work requires us to travel, the more we’re exposed to these “black swan” events – unexpected, disruptive, and apparently impossible to miss when we look at them in retrospect.

Hindsight, of course, is 20/20 – but is it possible to predict these “black swans”, or at least reduce their impact on our frequent flyers? In his writing, Carl’s made the point that data can help us do so to at least some extent. I think he’s right, especially about conditional events like tax liability that build up over time – but I also feel there’s a difference between predicting disruptions, and reacting to them. Some events, like state emergencies, are almost impossible to predict, no matter how much or how centralised your data. But if our travellers have the tools to quickly adapt to circumstances – whether it’s booking a last-minute flight on the fly, or getting critical safety updates on your go-to travel management app – they’ll be able to handle these disruptions with far less risk to their persons.

The key, as Carl rightly points out, is for our people to trust us with their data. And they’ll only do that if we can show them that doing so not only helps them avoid, but also get out of disruptions that corporate travel may put them in. My question is: would you trust your company with all your travel data? And why, or why not?