For decades, the business traveller’s side of the corporate travel bargain was relatively straightforward: follow policy, book through approved channels and let the company worry about the rest.
That model is being tested.
A business trip these days can be disrupted by everything from extreme weather and airspace closures to political unrest, cyberattacks, transportation failures and sudden changes in border requirements. At the same time, travellers have become increasingly dependent on smartphones, apps and cloud-based information to navigate their journeys.
The result is a curious paradox. Travellers have never had more technology and corporate support behind them, yet when something genuinely unexpected happens, the person standing in an airport, hotel lobby or unfamiliar city may still have to make the first important decisions alone.
Increasingly, being a good traveller means being a prepared one.
The scale of disruption helps explain why. Zurich Insurance Group’s 2026 Business Travel Outlook, based on 4,000 international business travellers, found that 80 per cent experienced at least one disruption while travelling for work in 2025. More than half encountered an incident or emergency, while 20 per cent experienced natural disasters, geopolitical threats or societal unrest. Some 43 per cent said they feel less safe travelling for business than they once did.
Research from BCD Travel points to a similar shift. In its survey of 1,284 business travellers, transportation accidents were the leading concern, cited by 37 per cent, followed by health emergencies at 35 per cent. Crime and natural disasters were also significant worries. Eight per cent of travellers had experienced an incident during the previous year that required company assistance, with weather responsible for almost one-quarter of those cases.
Yet perhaps the most interesting numbers have less to do with what travellers fear than with how prepared they are when something actually happens.
Nearly one-third of respondents in BCD’s research did not know where to find their company’s safety information. Roughly 30 per cent were unsure whom they should contact during an emergency, while 18 per cent were uncertain whether an incident was serious enough to warrant asking for help.
That gap matters because travel risk is increasingly moving faster than corporate systems can react.
International SOS’s Risk Outlook 2026 found that 57 per cent of organizations believe new risks are emerging faster than they can manage them, while 74 per cent said the window available for making critical decisions is shrinking. Only 35 per cent were confident they could mobilize teams rapidly in response.
Its mid-year research adds another complication: information itself has become part of the problem. False, misleading or unverified information is making it harder for organizations to determine what is actually happening during fast-moving health and security incidents. Only 10 per cent of organizations surveyed said they could respond very quickly to emerging risks.
For the person already on the road, those minutes can matter.
Duty of Care Is Becoming a Two-Way Street
None of this eliminates an employer’s responsibility to protect people travelling on its behalf. If anything, modern travel risk management requires companies to know where employees are supposed to be, assess potential threats, provide reliable assistance and communicate quickly when circumstances change.
There is even an international framework for doing so. ISO 31030 provides organizations with guidance covering travel-risk policies, threat identification, risk assessment, prevention and mitigation.
But there is a difference between a company having a plan and a traveller knowing how to use it.
SAP Concur’s 2026 Global Business Travel Survey exposes just how unsettled that division of responsibility has become. Only 58 per cent of business travellers were mostly or completely confident their organization could successfully get them out if they became trapped in a country by a dangerous situation or emergency. Meanwhile, 86 per cent of travel managers worried their organizations were not doing enough to protect employees travelling for work.
Perhaps most strikingly, only 38 per cent of CFOs surveyed believed their organization was completely responsible for employee safety during business travel, suggesting that many companies increasingly see responsibility as shared with the traveller.
The reality of the world these days makes personal preparedness more than an exercise in cautious travel. It is becoming part of the modern business traveller’s skill set.
The Smartphone Problem
Ironically, one of travel’s greatest conveniences can also create one of its biggest vulnerabilities.
Boarding passes, hotel reservations, payment cards, maps, translation tools, emergency contacts and travel documents can now live on a single device. Lose that device — or simply lose power, connectivity or access to an account — and an extraordinarily capable traveller can suddenly become surprisingly helpless.
The solution is decidedly low-tech.
Important phone numbers should be available somewhere other than the phone. Copies of passports, visas, insurance information and itineraries should be accessible offline. Travellers should know their company’s emergency assistance number before they need it, not search for it while something is going wrong.
A second payment method can matter when a card is blocked or a payment network fails. Knowing the airline’s own rebooking options can save time during a cancellation. Understanding what travel insurance actually covers can be more useful than simply knowing that a policy exists.
And travellers should periodically verify entry and documentation requirements rather than assuming that what was true when a trip was booked remains true on departure day.
None of these measures is particularly sophisticated. That is precisely the point.
Know Where You Are — and Let Someone Else Know Too
There is another challenge created by increasingly flexible travel.
Corporate systems are generally very good at knowing where an employee is scheduled to be. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as knowing where the employee actually is.
A missed connection, independently booked hotel, changed flight or spontaneous side trip can quickly make an itinerary inaccurate. Blended business and leisure travel adds another layer. GBTA research has found that 46 per cent of travel buyers reported employees taking more blended trips than a year earlier, while Canadian research found 55 per cent of business travellers extending work trips for personal time.
That freedom comes with a practical responsibility: if plans change significantly, someone should know.
Location sharing inevitably raises privacy questions, but travellers appear more receptive when its purpose is clearly safety. SAP Concur found that 79 per cent of business travellers were at least somewhat comfortable with employers tracking their location during work trips when doing so could help protect them.
The issue becomes particularly important during major disruptions. An organization cannot easily assist an employee it believes is in one city when that person has independently travelled to another.
Prepared Doesn’t Mean Paranoid
There is a danger in talking about travel risk as though the world has suddenly become too dangerous to explore.
It hasn’t.
Business travel remains enormously valuable, and the same SAP Concur study found 93 per cent of travellers believed work trips positively affected their mental or physical wellbeing.
Nor does preparedness mean researching every imaginable catastrophe before boarding an aircraft.
The better approach is much simpler: assume that at some point something ordinary will go wrong.
A flight will be cancelled. A phone will stop working. A credit card will be declined. A passport will disappear. A storm will close an airport. A demonstration will block a road. A traveller will become sick somewhere unfamiliar.
The objective isn’t to predict which one.
It is to make sure none of them leaves you without options.
That may be the biggest change in the way experienced travellers need to think about the road today. Corporate duty of care still matters enormously, as do travel management companies, airlines, insurers, hotels and increasingly sophisticated risk-monitoring systems.
But the final layer of resilience is the traveller.
The most useful question before the next trip may therefore be remarkably simple: If my phone stopped working, my flight disappeared and my plans suddenly changed, would I know what to do next?
Today, knowing the answer is becoming as important as knowing where you’re going.
