Coronavirus: Traveller safety and business stability

Get all this information in a video. 

At Egencia we're here to help support your business needs while minimizing risk for your travelers. 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 Traveler Tracker

• Use the Egencia Traveler Tracker to locate where your travelers 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, city, region, or a specific geographical area in the map.

Review your business travel policy

• Block specific air destinations: To ensure your travelers don’t take any unnecessary risks, you can either define a route or destination out of policy or block the ability to book flights to specific destinations.
• Update Egencia traveler limit: Limit the number of travelers on the same trip or flight by updating your organization’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 travelers 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 travelers’ contact information

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

Directly communicate with your travelers with Egencia

• Traveler messages: Choose the specific alerts you want to share on your organization’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 travelers whenever they receive a booking confirmation.
• Highlight your company’s duty of care: Ensure your travelers have the information they need about your duty of care guidelines by adding a favorite link to your policy on your organization’s Egencia home page. Be sure to include what processes your organization has in place for emergency situations..
• If you don’t have specific duty of care guidelines, you can use these tips to help your travelers.

Tips to keep your travelers informed

• Promote the Egencia app: Ensure your travelers use the Egencia app while they’re on the road. The “traveler 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 travelers, 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 travelers) or you can contact your account manager to opt in at company level.
• Join the Egencia Connect 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 travelers 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 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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