When something goes wrong during a business trip, the first question a company asks is almost always the same: where are our people, and are they okay?
The ability to answer that question quickly and act appropriately is what duty of care in corporate travel is really about.
Duty of care is an organization's legal and moral obligation to take reasonable steps to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of its employees, including when those employees are traveling for work.
Travelers are operating outside the familiar safety net of the office, often in unfamiliar cities or countries, with limited resources and no immediate support structure around them. The company that sent them has a responsibility to know where they are, monitor conditions that might affect them, and have a plan for getting them help when something goes wrong.
That responsibility sits with the employer, not the airline, hotel, or even travel management company. A TMC provides the tools that help companies fulfill their duty of care. The obligation itself belongs to the organization.
For many companies, duty of care is something they think about reactively, after an incident or close call. That's understandable, but it's also risky.
The practical problem with reactive duty of care is that it requires you to build the plane while flying it. When a security event unfolds or a hurricane disrupts a major hub, you don't have time to figure out how many travelers are affected, how to reach them, or what options they have. You need that information already at your fingertips.
That's what a travel program with proper duty of care infrastructure gives you.
There's also a broader dimension beyond crisis response. Modern business travelers expect their employers to look out for them—not just in emergencies, but as a baseline feature of how the travel program is run. Companies that take duty of care seriously tend to have higher traveler trust, better program adoption, and fewer incidents that escalate into real problems.
Fulfilling your duty of care as an employer is really a set of ongoing practices built into how your travel program operates. A few of the key elements:
You can't protect people you can't find. The foundation of any duty of care program is visibility into where your travelers are at any given time, based on their active itineraries, not physical GPS location. When you know which travelers are booked into a city or region affected by a developing situation, you can act.
Christopherson's risk management tools, built into the Andavo platform, give administrators an itinerary-based map of every active traveler—updated from booking data across all sources, with color-coded flight status and a filtered view that instantly surfaces which travelers are affected by a specific event.
Duty of care isn't just about responding to crises; it's about seeing them coming. That means having access to global risk intelligence that covers security incidents, political unrest, severe weather, health emergencies, and other disruptions that could affect travelers.
The Andavo platform pulls this intelligence from a company that provides the same enterprise-grade global risk feed used by governments and multinational organizations. Risk alerts appear directly on the admin dashboard alongside the traveler map—with severity levels and one-click filtering to show only the travelers in affected areas. No separate login, no switching to a third-party tool.
When something happens, travelers need to hear from their company. Contextual push notifications through the Andavo mobile app alert travelers when a disruption intersects with their active itinerary. Notifications are triggered by the actual trip data, not broadcast to everyone on the program.
Risk alerts and traveler visibility only help if someone can act on them. That means having a clear internal escalation path, and a TMC partner whose advisors can support travelers in real time when situations develop. Christopherson's travel advisors are available 24/7/365 — experienced people who can rebook flights, coordinate logistics, and support travelers navigating disruptions, complementing the technology layer with human expertise when it matters most.
Duty of care doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of your travel program — it's woven into your travel policy. A well-constructed travel policy addresses not just where travelers can book and what they can spend, but also what safety protocols apply when traveling to higher-risk destinations, how travelers should communicate their whereabouts, and what resources are available to them in an emergency.
If your travel policy hasn't been reviewed with duty of care in mind, that's worth adding to the agenda. A modern approach to risk management in business travel goes beyond basic coverage; it's built into how the program runs day to day, not just activated when something goes wrong.
Companies without a managed travel program tend to have predictable gaps in their duty of care coverage:
When employees book through personal cards and consumer sites, there's no single source of truth for who's traveling where. Finding affected travelers during a crisis becomes a manual process of calling people individually.
Without a managed program, there's typically no systematic way to monitor events that could affect travelers — companies rely on employees to self-report, which is both slow and incomplete.
Mass emails after an incident are a poor substitute for proactive, itinerary-aware notifications that reach the right people with the right information.
Disruptions don't observe business hours. Travelers who can't reach anyone for help during an evening or weekend incident are effectively on their own.
These aren't gaps that only affect large enterprises. For any company that sends employees on the road regularly, the infrastructure to support them is part of the basic obligation. Switching to a managed travel program closes most of these gaps in one move.
Duty of care in corporate travel comes down to one question: if something happened to one of your travelers right now, would you know about it? And would you be able to help?
If the honest answer is "probably not," the good news is that the tools to change that are well-established. The harder part is recognizing that building those tools into your program before something happens is the whole point.
Christopherson's risk management capabilities, built into the Andavo platform, give travel managers and administrators the visibility, intelligence, and communication tools they need to fulfill their duty of care, and to do it without adding complexity or cost to the program.
For a deeper look at common business travel challenges and how a managed program addresses them, or to talk through what duty of care looks like for your specific program, we're happy to help.
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An employer’s duty of care is the legal and ethical responsibility to take reasonable steps to protect employees’ health, safety, and wellbeing while they are working—including when they are traveling for business. In a corporate travel context, this means knowing where employees are, monitoring risks, and providing support if something goes wrong.
In law, duty of care refers to the obligation to avoid actions or omissions that could reasonably cause harm to others. It’s a foundational concept in negligence law and applies when there is a recognized relationship—such as employer and employee—where one party is expected to act with reasonable care to prevent foreseeable harm.
A duty of care arises when a relationship exists in which one party can reasonably foresee that their actions may impact another’s safety or wellbeing. For employers, this duty applies whenever employees are performing work-related activities, including traveling for business, attending events, or working offsite.
A breach of duty of care occurs when a person or organization fails to meet the expected standard of care, resulting in harm or increased risk of harm. In business travel, this could include failing to track traveler locations, not providing support during disruptions, or lacking a plan to respond to emergencies.
Duty of care in negligence is one of the key elements required to establish a negligence claim. It refers to the obligation to act with reasonable care. If that duty is breached and causes harm, the responsible party may be legally liable for damages.
To establish duty of care in negligence, you typically need to show that a duty existed, the harm was reasonably foreseeable, and there was sufficient proximity or relationship between the parties. Courts also consider whether it is fair, just, and reasonable to impose that duty in the specific situation.
While definitions vary, duty of care responsibilities are often grouped into four practical areas: identifying risks, taking reasonable steps to prevent harm, monitoring conditions that could affect safety, and responding appropriately when an incident occurs. In corporate travel, this translates to visibility, risk intelligence, communication, and support.
Primary duty of care refers to the main responsibility an organization has to ensure the health and safety of those under its care. For employers, this means creating safe systems of work, including travel programs that provide visibility, risk monitoring, and access to assistance when employees are away from the office.
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