Duty of Care in Business Travel - What Legal Actually Requires

Every company I've worked with that has a "duty of care" policy has the same two elements: a travel assistance hotline number and a sentence about registering international trips. That satisfies almost none of the actual legal standard, and most companies find this out only after something goes wrong.

This isn't legal advice — talk to your employment counsel — but I want to walk through the operational gaps that come up repeatedly when companies actually review what they have versus what they need.

The Legal Foundation

U.S. employers aren't operating under a single federal "duty of care" statute the way some international jurisdictions have codified it. The obligation emerges from common law negligence principles, OSHA's general duty clause, and in some states, workers' compensation frameworks that create specific employer obligations for work-related injuries.

The practical standard is this: if you direct an employee to travel for work, you have an obligation to take reasonable steps to protect them from foreseeable risks. "Reasonable steps" is where the interpretation lives, and it's significantly more than having an emergency number on file.

Courts and arbitration panels have looked at cases where employers were found liable for failing to: provide accurate destination risk information, maintain records of traveler whereabouts during an incident, have a documented emergency response procedure, or act promptly when a traveler reported being in danger.

The Know-Where-They-Are Problem

This is the most operationally significant gap for most mid-size companies. If a natural disaster or security incident happens in a city where your employees are traveling, can you determine within 30 minutes which employees are there and how to reach them?

Most companies can't. Travel bookings are spread across personal accounts, corporate cards, and departmental booking arrangements. There's no single itinerary database. HR has emergency contacts but not real-time location data tied to active trips.

In one incident we're aware of — a severe weather event affecting a major convention city — a 400-person company spent six hours manually calling around to figure out who was at the conference and who had already left. The answer was eventually "eleven employees, all accounted for," but the process was chaotic and the delay was indefensible from a duty of care standpoint.

The fix is straightforward: all bookings in a single platform with active itinerary data. When an alert comes in for a specific city, you pull a real-time traveler list in seconds. This is table stakes for duty of care, and it's only possible if bookings are centralized.

Risk Tiering by Destination

Not every destination carries the same risk, and your duty of care obligation scales accordingly. Sending someone to Atlanta for a client meeting and sending someone to Lagos for a business development trip have very different risk profiles, and your preparation should reflect that.

Several travel risk intelligence providers publish real-time country and city risk ratings. The standard tiers run from 1 (low risk) to 4 or 5 (extreme risk). For Tier 3 and above destinations, the minimum defensible practice includes: a pre-travel security briefing, proof that the employee received and acknowledged the briefing, 24-hour check-in protocols, and an emergency evacuation plan specific to the destination.

Most companies have none of this documented. The defense that "we didn't know it was risky" stops working the moment you're in a jurisdiction where your traveler was injured and opposing counsel pulls up a State Department advisory that was publicly available before the trip was approved.

Medical Emergency Coverage

Standard group health insurance policies have significant coverage gaps for international travelers. Many U.S. plans pay minimal benefits outside the network, have high out-of-pocket requirements for out-of-network emergency care, and don't cover evacuation at all.

Medical evacuation from Southeast Asia can run $80,000 to $200,000 depending on the situation. Emergency evacuation coverage, whether through a standalone policy or a travel assistance program, is not optional for companies sending people internationally.

Domestically, the gap is less severe but still real. Employees traveling to cities far from home who need urgent care are typically covered, but the reimbursement process can be slow and confusing enough to create real hardship. A clear, pre-communicated process for handling medical expenses during travel — including advance payment options for large bills — is part of a reasonable duty of care framework.

The Consent and Acknowledgment Problem

One area where companies consistently underinvest is documentation. If an employee is injured on a business trip and files a claim or lawsuit, one of the first questions is whether they were informed of the risks and what the company's emergency procedures were.

Email threads and verbal briefings don't hold up well. What works is a consistent pre-travel acknowledgment — built into the trip approval flow — where the traveler confirms they've received destination risk information and know how to reach the emergency assistance program. This is a 15-second step that creates a documented record for every trip.

In our platform, this is configurable at the destination tier level. Low-risk domestic trips route without any acknowledgment step. Tier 2 and above destinations generate an automatic briefing notification and require acknowledgment before the trip is fully approved. The HR team can pull acknowledgment records for any trip in the system.

The Honest Question

If an employee is hurt on a business trip tomorrow, can you tell legal exactly where they were, what risk briefing they received, how quickly you were notified, and what steps you took? If the honest answer involves phrases like "we'd have to check their email" or "I think we have a hotline number somewhere," there's work to do.