Knowing where your people are when it matters
Duty of Care and Traveller Risk Management
Imagine that something has just happened in a city where you have people travelling for business: a storm, a strike, an incident on the news. The first question is simple: Is anyone from our company affected? For many businesses, answering it means trawling through expense claims, calendars and email threads while the clock runs.
Wayte Travel Management gives you a faster answer. We help you manage the risks before your people set off, then support your duty of care while they’re away, with every booking on one record and a UK-based team on the end of the phone 24 hours a day.
Pre-trip travel risk information and destination advice
Risk management happens before anyone sets off. When we quote for a trip, we can include the latest FCDO (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) travel advice for the destination, with links to its visa and entry requirements. That way, any change in the official advice is spotted while the trip is still being planned.
Before departure, we can also send travellers a briefing on the health, security and conflict risks where they’re going, including pointers on vaccinations. For medical questions we’ll direct them to the right sources, but nobody should land somewhere without having a good idea of what to expect.
The Wayte Travel Companion App allows your traveller to take that information with them, alongside their itinerary, UK government advice for the country they’re in and any documents your company wants them to carry, such as insurance details.
All of this helps your managers and travellers to make informed decisions. The decisions themselves, and your own risk assessments, stay with you.
Travel policy controls and approval workflows
Risk management starts at the point of booking. Your travel policy can flag the destinations that need extra thought, so any trip there goes to a nominated senior approver before it’s confirmed. You can name several approvers, give different roles different permissions and decide exactly which trips need sign-off.
Those rules apply however the trip is booked, whether a consultant makes the reservation or a traveller uses Wayte Travel Online. A trip to a destination you’ve flagged can’t be booked through us without the right person knowing about it.
Your business travel policy can also look after traveller wellbeing. Some companies allow a higher class of travel on long journeys, or for people heading straight into meetings, so they arrive rested rather than worn out. If you’re drafting or updating your risk management and duty of care policies, your Wayte travel consultant can help you benchmark against what works for other businesses and help you decide what would work best for you and your travellers.
Knowing where your travellers are
Duty of care is about looking after the people who are already on the move. Every trip booked through Wayte Travel Management, whether it’s a flight, a train journey or a hotel booking, and whether your business travel consultant booked it or a traveller booked it online, is logged in our Duty of Care Portal. That gives you one answer to the question “who’s travelling, and where?”
If something happens, we can search the portal by traveller name, flight number, destination or date, or select an area on a map, and see straight away which of your people are there or due to arrive. Where contact details are on the booking, we can reach travellers directly, but we usually work through your managers, because a call from someone they know is more personal and more targeted.
Some people call this traveller tracking. We prefer not to, because nobody is being watched. The portal works from the bookings themselves.
It can only show the trips we know about. A hotel paid for on a personal card or a ticket bought at the station sits outside the record, and that’s often the gap that matters most when you’re trying to account for everyone.
Our Duty of Care Portal
Every booking we make is passed automatically to our Duty of Care Portal.
Searching for your travellers
Our team can search by traveller name, flight number, destination or date range, and every one of your travellers linked to that search appears straight away. We can also select destinations on a map and run reports for a particular area.
Contacting your travellers
Where a traveller’s phone number or email is on the booking, we can contact them directly from the portal. However, in practice, we usually go through the management team first, because a call from a manager they know is more personal and reassuring.
Rerouting your travellers
When airspace closes, the portal lets us find every one of your travellers in the region. We then take the list of affected flights, check which alternatives are still operating and look for routes around the closed airspace, so your colleagues can get home safely.
Also, all the information from your pre-trip briefings is stored in the same system, so what your people are told before they go and what we know while they’re away sits in one place.
24/7 out-of-hours travel support
Our office hours are 08:30 to 17:30, Monday to Friday. But business travel problems don’t keep office hours.
Outside those hours, the number you always call reaches our 24/7 UK-based out-of-hours team. You speak to a person, not a recorded menu and they can see your bookings and act on them straight away.
That might mean rebooking a cancelled flight at 03:00, finding a room for someone stranded overnight or changing a route when bad weather closes an airport. Whatever the problem, the aim is the same: get your traveller moving again, or staying somewhere safe until they can.
Travellers with the app get the same live flight updates and can reach out-of-hours support from the same screen as their itinerary.
It’s the part of our service we hope you’ll never need, but the part that counts the most when you do.
Travel disruption and incident response
When disruption hits, our team looks for a way around it instead of waiting for it to clear. When an air traffic control failure grounded flights across the UK, our travel consultants worked into the night, rerouting travellers by Eurostar to Brussels, arranging transfers to the airport and flying them onward to New York.
The same approach applies to any serious incidents. If airspace closes, we identify every affected traveller, check which flights are still operating and look for other routes home. Not everyone affected needs the same help. Someone delayed by half an hour can wait, while someone with no way out comes first, so we prioritise by need rather than working down a list.
Throughout, we keep you informed about who is affected, what we’re doing and what has been rebooked, from flights and trains to hotel rooms and transfers. Your managers stay in charge of contacting their own people, with the facts in front of them.
Duty of care reporting for HR and health and safety
If a decision about a trip is ever questioned, HR and health and safety teams need a clear record of what happened. Our records show who travelled where and when, which bookings needed approval, who gave that approval, and when pre-trip briefings were sent. We can run reports for any destination or date range, so you can quickly see who was in a particular place at a particular time.
Alongside your spend and policy reporting in Wayte Travel Analytix, these records support your duty of care. They don’t replace your own risk assessments or travel policy, and your obligations as an employer remain your own. What they give you is reliable information to act on.
Duty of care and traveller risk management by sector
The risks change from one industry to the next.
For professional services, most business trips are to major cities on fixed schedules. The priority is finding out quickly whether anyone was near an incident and getting senior staff home promptly if plans need to change.
Marine crew rotations carry different risks. Crews travel at short notice to ports and vessels, sometimes in regions with higher security or health risks, on itineraries that shift with the tides and the weather. Pre-trip briefings, careful routing and round-the-clock rebooking matter far more here.
Get more detail on how we support these sectors on our Financial Services and Marine and Crew Rotation pages, or ask how we’d approach your sector.
Duty of care and traveller risk management FAQs
Who answers the out-of-hours number?
A member of our UK-based out-of-hours team, not an automated service or an offshore call centre. They can see your bookings and travel policy, so they can rebook, reroute or find a room straight away, without you having to explain everything from the start.
Does this cover hotels and rail as well as flights?
Yes. Every flight, train and hotel booked through us, whether by your consultant or through Wayte Travel Online, goes into the Duty of Care Portal. So you can see where your people are staying and how they’re travelling, not just which flight they took.
Can we block bookings to certain countries?
You can require senior approval for any destination you choose, so a trip there can’t be booked through us, your business travel team, until the authorised person has signed it off. If your policy rules out a country altogether, tell us and we will apply that to every booking.
Do you provide destination risk information before travel?
Yes. We can include the UK government’s FCDO travel advice and visa and entry links when we quote, then send travellers a pre-trip briefing on the health, security and conflict risks at their destination. For medical questions, we’ll point you to the right sources. All of this helps you make informed decisions. Those final decisions and risk assessments stay with you.
What happens if there’s an incident overnight?
Our 24/7 UK-based out-of-hours team picks it up. They’ll identify which of your travellers are affected, work with your nominated contacts and start rebooking or rerouting anyone who needs it.
Can you tell us where our travellers are right now?
Yes, for any trip booked through us. Call your dedicated travel consultant, or our out-of-hours service at night. We can search by name, destination, flight or date to tell you who is where, or due to be. Trips booked outside Wayte Travel Management won’t appear, which is one good reason to book everything through one place.
Review your duty of care with Wayte Travel Management
If you’re not sure how quickly you could account for your travellers today, it’s worth finding out. Tell us how your people book and travel now, and we’ll show you where the gaps are and how our 24/7 team would support you if something goes wrong.