Employee Safety: Travel Guides

You are responsible for traveling employees' safety. It's good to tell them what not to do. It's better to teach them how to be alert and anticipate and avoid trouble.

Avoid complacency. Bad things don't just happen to other people. Complacency causes all of us to ignore basic safety rules, Katz says. Convince your employees that they can be victims if they don't take precautions.

Keep in touch. Mike Belcher's company has a dedicated travel website where its employees can log on to get daily travel information. But if they're traveling to an area considered a hotspot, they'll get that information pushed to them in an e-mail with hyperlinks to safety information on the company's internal websiteplus a follow-up phone call. "If you're going to Saudi Arabia, we'll be calling you. And if you're a single woman traveling to India, we'll definitely follow up with you," says Belcher.

Prevention is cheaper than a travel crisis. Tell travelers what is likely to happen, and you'll both benefit. "If you tell an employee not to drink the water in Venezuela, you just saved your company $10,000 in medical bills for the employee who won't get sick while he's there," says McIndoe. Lesson No. 3: Know Why the Fire Chief Likes Hotel Room 212Now it's time for the class segment on hotels. Katz asks us to take note of the illuminated exit signs in our basement classroom so that we can get out of our training room in case of an emergency. Security tackles the subject of access control, letting the right people in to the right places. But for travelers, getting in is one thing. It's even more important to know how to leave.

"I know a fire chief who won't ever stay above the third floor in a hotel," Katz says. He notes that fire ladders don't go above the seventh floor, and if you have to jump, any jump that's more than three times your height will result in serious injury or death. As the fire chief knows, you can survive a jump from the third floor window.

When you go to your room after checking in, take a minute to find the emergency exits and the stairwells. Start at your door and count the doors to the exit. In case of a fire, you'll want to be able to get to that stairwell even if the smoke prevents you from seeing it.

It's also best to choose a reputable hotel chain, whose security standards will likely be on par with those in the United States. Such a hotel would use passcard keys, as opposed to metal keys that thieves could copy and use to access your room at their leisure. The hotel would have a safe where you could lock your laptop, and it'd have locks on the windows. It would also not be a motel, where a thief or attacker could walk into your room from the ground floor without having to pass by a front desk or cross a lobby.