What is duty of care in corporate travel?

Data & Analytics

Oct 2

Duty of care is a company's legal and ethical obligation to protect employees traveling for work. It depends on knowing where every traveler is.

What does duty of care means in practice?

Duty of care describes the responsibility an employer holds for the safety and wellbeing of employees while they are traveling on company business. It covers the full arc of a trip:

assessing risk before travel is approved,
knowing a traveler's location and itinerary while they are away from home,
reaching them quickly when conditions change,
and getting them home or to safety when a disruption becomes an emergency.

The obligation is both regulatory and practical. In many jurisdictions, employers carry a documented legal responsibility for employee safety that extends to business travel, and insurers, boards, and legal teams increasingly expect evidence that a program can locate and communicate with travelers on demand.

What makes duty of care difficult is not the intent. It is the data. Responding to an incident requires a current answer to one question: who is where, and how do we reach them?

Why does this matter for corporate travel programs?

Duty of care depends on the completeness of the traveler record. Three consequences follow when that record has gaps.

Unaccounted-for travelers during an incident. Security teams work from an itinerary list and find travelers whose details no longer match what was booked. Each record has to be resolved manually.
Coverage reporting becomes an estimate. Bookings and changes made outside visible channels reduce the share of travel a company can account for. A program cannot state with confidence who is where.
Slower response. Locating a traveler is the first step. Reaching and rebooking them is the second, and that requires a servicing layer that can act on a booking wherever it originated.

Programs often try to close the gap by restricting where travelers can book. Travelers who find the mandated channel limiting book around it, and the program loses visibility into the trips it most wanted to track.

How does Blockskye address duty of care?

Blockskye treats traveler visibility as a property of the infrastructure, not a reporting feature added on top. Every booking, modification, and cancellation is written to a shared, tamper-resistant ledger the moment it occurs. The traveler record and the company record are the same record.

Because Blockskye supports omnichannel servicing, that record holds wherever a traveler acts. A flight changed in an airline app, a booking made through KAYAK for Business, and a modification handled by an agent resolve into one consolidated itinerary that stays in sync.

That foundation makes real-time duty of care possible. Traveler location reflects current itineraries rather than the state of a booking at purchase. Disruption monitoring identifies affected travelers as conditions change. Blockskye Reporting draws on the same data, so the coverage figures presented to risk, legal, and executive stakeholders match what the operations team sees.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between duty of care and traveler tracking?

Duty of care is the employer's overall obligation to protect employees while they travel for work, including risk assessment, communication, and emergency response. Traveler tracking is one capability that supports it — the ability to locate employees during a disruption or emergency. A program can have tracking in place and still fall short on duty of care if it cannot reach travelers quickly, rebook them, or account for trips booked outside its visible channels.

Is duty of care a legal requirement for employers?

In many jurisdictions, yes. Employers carry documented legal responsibilities for employee health and safety that extend to business travel, and the specific standard varies by country and by the nature of the travel involved. Legal exposure aside, insurers and boards commonly ask travel and risk teams to demonstrate that the program can locate and communicate with travelers, which makes duty of care a governance requirement as much as a regulatory one. Companies with international programs generally work with their legal counsel to define the standard that applies to them.

How does data leakage affect duty of care?

Data leakage occurs when travelers book or change travel outside the channels the program can see. Every leaked booking is a traveler the company cannot locate during an incident and cannot include in coverage reporting. Because leakage is often driven by traveler preference for a faster or more complete booking experience, the durable fix is infrastructure that captures activity across channels rather than policy that restricts where travelers are allowed to book.

Can a corporate travel program deliver duty of care without restricting how travelers book?

Yes, when the underlying system captures bookings and changes from any channel into a single record. Restriction-based approaches assume visibility requires a narrow channel, which tends to push travelers around the program and reduce the very data the restriction was meant to protect. Channel-agnostic capture removes the tradeoff by making the record complete regardless of where the traveler acts.

What data does a company need to meet its duty of care obligations?

At minimum, a program needs current traveler location and itinerary detail, working contact information, real-time updates when a booking changes, and the ability to identify which travelers are affected by a given event. The requirement that matters most is timeliness. An itinerary record that reflects the state of a booking at purchase rather than its current state can produce a confident answer that turns out to be wrong.