Better, Safer Business Travel - BS ISO 31030 Travel Risk Guidance

SEPTEMBER 2021

Almost perfect timing for BS ISO 31030:2021 Guidance for organizations 

It has taken nearly ten years for an idea shared at a British Standards meeting in London to grow and develop into a full International Standard. The story of how the standard emerged is a great example of how industry professionals can work together to share experience and build solutions that can help address serious issues. The new guidance from ISO and the BSI sets a new standard for travel risk management that will help organizations of all types get back to work and build business travel confidence.   

Modern business takes our people all over the world, but for some the experience of the jet set lifestyle can quickly transform into a nightmare if things go wrong.  A serious illness, traffic accident, mugging or theft can quickly throw a business travellers’ plans into chaos and expose them and their employer to even greater risks and potential harm. Yet most business travellers and their employers these risks are rarely thought through, and this leads many struggling to cope when the inevitable happens.  This happens to hundreds of thousands of people each year, but it doesn’t have to be this way and in a post-covid world we must do more to minimise travel risk of all types.

The proposal to ISO for a new guidance for travel risk came from the BSI Risk Management committee back in 2017, and was based on the experience gained from research and contributions from stakeholders across a number of sectors.  The BSI introduced initial guidance in the form of a Publicly Available Specification in 2016 covering travelling for work entitled PAS 3001:2016 and research undertaken by the Continuity Forum confirmed there was an appetite and need to further develop this guidance further for those travelling on business.  

Over the past 4 years experts from the ISO Technical Committee (TC262 WG7) has been building good practice with contributions from experts from dozens of national standards bodies (NSBs). The Continuity Forum has been deeply involved in this and formed at an early stage a specialist panel in our Policy Working Group to ensure the standard the needs of the sector and reflected good practice.  This international group directly contributed to the guidance and ensures that the guidance the new standard contains will help manage travel risk in the real world and integrate across the breadth of the sectors needs. 

This guidance lay out at comprehensive framework of activities that users can tailor to fit their specific situations and needs. Importantly the guidance offered also provides support and insight for organizations providing travel services on good practice and how they can help their clients maintain the ‘Duty of Care’ and develop the quality of their own services. 

ISO 31030:2021 will also be extremely useful to those organizations using other standards as it will plug right into policy and procedures used across related areas of Risk, Business Continuity, Crisis, Information Security and Resilience Management amongst others. 

The Continuity Forum is starting our partner briefings this week and in October we’ll be running a number of events to share the standard and how it works in practice with the BSI and other partners. For more details on these activities or just to find out more please get in touch on +44 208 993 1599 (UK) or email us at info@continuityforum.org.