tmcmatchDuty of care to business travellers
Every travel management company's website uses the phrase. Almost none of them quote the section it comes from, and none of them say the part that follows from it: the duty is the employer's, and buying a supplier does not move it anywhere.
Where the duty actually comes from
There is no special statute for business travellers. There is the ordinary employer duty, applied to an employee who is working somewhere other than your premises.
It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees.Read it on legislation.gov.uk
Two words in that sentence do most of the work. “Employer”: the duty attaches to you, and s.2 says nothing about contractors you may have engaged to help you discharge it. “Reasonably practicable”: the obligation is proportionate, which means what is expected scales with the risk rather than being fixed.
Section 2(2) then lists particular matters the duty extends to. The one that matters most to a travel programme is (c):
the provision of such information, instruction, training and supervision as is necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of his employeesRead it on legislation.gov.uk
Information, instruction, training and supervision. Not tracking software. The software is a way of delivering some of those things at a distance; it is not itself the obligation, and an employer that has bought the software and told its travellers nothing has bought a tool rather than discharged a duty.
What the duty produces, and what a supplier can do about it
| Obligation | Stays with you | What a supplier supplies | How to test it in a tender |
|---|---|---|---|
| Know where people are | The duty to know is yours. A traveller whose itinerary was booked outside the agreed channel is invisible, and that is a policy failure, not a tooling one. | Tracking and reporting against bookings made through the channel. It can only ever see what it booked. | Ask for a live report of who is in a named city on a named date, during the tender, against a test itinerary. |
| Assess the risk before the trip | Assessment is an employer function under s.2. It has to reflect the destination, the traveller and the work, not just the country. | Destination information, risk ratings and pre-trip approval workflows — inputs to your assessment, not a substitute for it. | Ask what triggers an approval step, who receives it, and what happens if nobody actions it before departure. |
| Give information, instruction and training | Expressly named in s.2(2)(c). Travellers need to know what to do and whom to contact before they need it, not after. | Pre-trip briefings and alerts, delivered into the booking flow where the traveller will actually see them. | Ask to see what a traveller receives, in the form they receive it, for a high-risk destination. |
| Be reachable, and be able to act | An out-of-hours arrangement you have not tested is an assumption. | 24-hour service, in-house or subcontracted, sometimes charged per call. | Ring the out-of-hours number during the tender, out of hours, and see who answers and what they can see. |
| Keep it under review | The duty is continuing. So is the evidence of having discharged it, which is what matters if anything is ever examined afterwards. | Reporting, incident logs and audit trails. | Ask what record survives the end of the contract, and in what format. See the exit criterion on the comparison page. |
The sentence worth rememberingA travel management company's tooling is how an employer discharges a duty it cannot delegate. That is a much better reason to demand a live demonstration against a test itinerary than “tracking is a useful feature”.
The channel problem, which is not a software problem
Every tracking system can only see what was booked through it. Travel booked outside the agreed channel — on a personal card, on a supplier's own website, by an assistant who has always done it that way — is invisible to the system and to you.
This is the practical reason the booking channel matters more than the tracking product. An organisation with meaningful leakage that buys a tracking system has bought a system that reports confidently on a subset. Tightening the channel fixes the problem; buying better software does not.
It is worth measuring before you buy anything: compare travel spend visible in your booking data against travel spend visible in expense claims and card statements. The gap is the leakage, and it is usually larger than expected.
The far end of the spectrum
The reason this reaches board level occasionally, rather than staying with whoever owns travel, is the 2007 Act.
An organisation to which this section applies is guilty of an offence if the way in which its activities are managed or organised—(a) causes a person's death, and (b) amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care owed by the organisation to the deceased.Read it on legislation.gov.uk
And s.1(3) attaches it to how the organisation is run rather than to an individual's carelessness:
An organisation is guilty of an offence under this section only if the way in which its activities are managed or organised by its senior management is a substantial element in the breach referred to in subsection (1).Read it on legislation.gov.uk
In Scotland the offence is called corporate homicide. None of this is an everyday travel-policy consideration and it would be dishonest to present it as one. It is, though, why “the way in which its activities are managed or organised” is the phrase to keep in mind when deciding whether your travel arrangements are a policy or a habit.
We are paid a fixed fee per enquiry agreed in advance, so nothing here is written to make a risk sound larger than it is in order to sell you something. Where the honest answer is that a rule is proportionate, or that a tool does not fix the underlying problem, the page says so.
Want suppliers to demonstrate this rather than describe it?
Send the requirement asking for a live tracking demonstration and the out-of-hours number, and compare what comes back.
The travel policy is a health and safety document
Which is a different document from the one most organisations have. A travel policy that addresses cabin class, advance booking windows and expense limits has covered spending and left out the part that creates an obligation.
The practical test: could a traveller, reading your policy on a phone in an airport, find who to contact at 03:00 and what to do first? If not, the policy has a gap that no amount of supplier tooling closes.
- Name the out-of-hours contact route and put it where a traveller will have it offline.
- Say what triggers a pre-trip assessment and who signs it off.
- Say what happens when FCDO advice changes for a trip already booked — who is told, and by whom.
- Say who is covered. Employees, contractors, guests. Decide it rather than discovering it.
- Say what the booking channel is and what happens outside it, because that is what decides whether any of the rest works.
Those five are a section in the RFP and ITT template, so suppliers answer them in writing instead of in a meeting.
Common questions
What is duty of care for business travellers?
It is not a separate legal concept. It is the ordinary employer duty in s.2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 — “to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all his employees” — applied to employees who happen to be working away from the employer's premises. Travel does not create a new duty; it makes the existing one harder to discharge.
Does duty of care transfer to the travel management company?
No. The statutory duty sits on the employer and is not something a commercial contract moves. A supplier's tooling is how an employer discharges the duty — tracking, alerts, out-of-hours cover — and good tooling makes a real difference to whether the duty is discharged. It does not change who owes it.
What does “so far as is reasonably practicable” mean?
It is the qualifier attached to the duty in s.2(1), and it is what makes the obligation proportionate rather than absolute. In practice it means the measures expected of you scale with the risk: an employer sending people to a stable city centre is not expected to do what an employer sending people to a high-risk region is. It is not a reason to do nothing, and it is assessed against what you knew or should have known.
Is the Corporate Manslaughter Act relevant to business travel?
It is the far end of the same spectrum. Section 1(1) of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 makes an organisation guilty of an offence where the way its activities are managed or organised causes a death and amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care. Section 1(3) adds that the way senior management manages or organises those activities must be a substantial element in the breach. In Scotland the offence is called corporate homicide. It is not an everyday travel-policy consideration, but it is the reason the board-level version of this question exists.
Do we need traveller tracking?
You need to be able to answer, quickly, who of yours is where. Tracking software is the usual way to do that and it is the reason the booking channel matters: a system can only see what was booked through it. If a large share of your travel is booked outside the channel, buying tracking will not fix the problem, and tightening the channel will.
What about contractors and non-employees?
The s.2 duty is owed to employees. Section 3 of the same Act deals with persons not in your employment who may be affected by your undertaking, and the practical position for a travel programme is that contractors and guests are frequently in the same aircraft, hotel and city as your staff. Most organisations decide, sensibly, to treat coverage as a question about who is travelling on their business rather than about employment status. That is a decision worth making explicitly rather than by default.
Where does FCDO travel advice fit?
It is the standard reference point for destination risk and the one an insurer or an investigator will look at. It is published free and changes without notice, which is why it matters whether your supplier surfaces changes to it for trips already booked, rather than only at the moment of booking.
Should the travel policy say all this?
Yes, and it is the reason to think of the travel policy as a health and safety document rather than a spending document. A policy that only addresses cost has left out the part that creates an obligation. The practical test is whether a traveller could find, in the policy, who to contact at 03:00 and what to do first.
Sources cited on this page
- Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, s.2
- Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, s.1
- GOV.UK — Foreign travel advice
- Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations 2018, reg 3
Every figure above was read from the source it is attributed to on 20 September 2026. How we check this.
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