Building a breakthrough consensus – the partnership is bringing together a cross-section of corporations and accommodation providers to determine and define a minimum level of ‘good practice’ for safety and security considerations to help better meet duty of care responsibilities.
mysa, the accommodation technology company and Travel Risk Academy, the home of Travel Optimisation have partnered to create a safety focus group consisting of senior travel, HR, risk managers and accommodation providers. The group will explore how accommodation providers worldwide can help companies better meet their duty of care responsibilities to their travellers through digital demonstration.
The goal of the safety focus group is to define a level of ‘good practice’ taking into consideration corporate risk management policy and guest wellbeing. Early stages of the discovery process have focused on key security risk factors and what buyers view as essential mitigation. The group are also considering which elements of a risk assessment can be supported by mysa’s digital safety and security evidence-based technology. By the start of 2025, the intent is to expand the group into a more expansive steering committee and publish the criteria for an industry-wide review.
Gary Hurst, founder and CEO at mysa, said: “The intention of the safety focus group is to bring buyers and accommodation providers together to provide a safer stay for employees. With little in the way of regulation across the accommodation sector, neither party has a universal benchmark of safety and security expectations. The focus group’s mission is to develop a code of good practice which can be both demonstrated and act as a guide for both parties”.
He goes on to add “Our technology will support ‘good practice’ by lending itself to enabling greater evidence-based verification of safety and security measures. The buyers will enjoy greater visibility of provider’s safety and security protocols, in turn better meet duty of care responsibilities whilst accommodation providers will benefit from a digital guidance roadmap, accepted industry-wide, rather than having to address the needs of multiple individual organisations.”
Bex Deadman, Co-founder, Travel Risk Academy (TRA) said “A core value of the TRA is to help provide organisations with the knowledge and tools for a holistic approach to managing travel and mitigating risks to their employees. We do this by taking a deeper dive into three key areas across business strategy, vendor management and end to end programme management; or put another way: What you need, what you have and how you can optimise the entire programme to balance the organisations objectives and the needs of multiple stakeholders”.
One of the key take-aways from the Travel Optimisation Management Summit 2024 was the reliance on trust in the accommodation sector in relation to safety and security and was an issue affecting everybody. By everybody, I mean organisations using accommodation services and more specifically their procurement, travel, mobility, security, and cyber-security teams, yet also the service providers supporting them; be that TMCs, RMCs, booking agents and most importantly the properties themselves.
We agreed to create a focus group to look at the desire and potential framework for an entry-level baseline that all accommodation providers would adopt and that would support the duty of care requirements that all organisations need to consider when procuring accommodation.
We are now ready to start socialising the work that we have done and look forward to introducing more buyers to the community group over the coming weeks.
To get involved, please visit our homepage to register your interest.
