A few years ago, a client called us from a hotel room in France. Their overseas development manager had been caught up in civil unrest. Roads blocked. Office locked down. Staff scattered across the city.
The first call wasn’t to us. It was to their travel insurance provider.
The answer they got: “This isn’t a medical event. Your policy doesn’t cover security incidents.”
They’d been paying premiums for three years. Six figures annually. And in the moment it mattered, the policy didn’t apply.
This isn’t an unusual story. It’s the most common story we hear from organizations who contact Sicuro Group after an incident. And it reveals a critical gap in how most companies think about corporate travel security and their duty of care obligations under the ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard.
The Corporate Travel Insurance Gap Nobody Talks About
What most organizations don’t realize until it’s too late is that standard corporate travel insurance covers medical emergencies: heart attacks, broken legs, hospital transfers. It does not cover security events. Political instability. Civil unrest. Forced evacuations. Kidnap response. The scenarios that are actually keeping your risk team up at night and the ones that are becoming more frequent as global volatility increases.
Worse still, even when an insurer offers a security rider, they’ll often decline the claim if you can’t demonstrate you had a formalized ISO 31030 Assessment in place before the incident. The question isn’t “do we have travel insurance?” It’s “would our insurer actually pay out and can we prove we took reasonable steps?”
That word “reasonable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And increasingly, insurers are using ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard as the benchmark for what “reasonable” looks like when it comes to travel risk management.
Most companies don’t discover their travel insurance gap until after an incident. Our ISO 31030 Gap Assessment identifies exactly where your duty of care program stands and what needs to change.
What Is ISO 31030 and Why Does It Matter Now?
ISO 31030 is the international standard for Travel Risk Management, published in 2021. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you will. It’s rapidly becoming the framework that insurers, regulators, and legal counsel reference when they evaluate whether an organization met its duty of care obligations to traveling employees.
It’s not a checklist. It’s not a certification you hang on the wall. It’s a framework for how you think about, plan for, and respond to the risks your people face when they travel for work. You align to it and become compliant with it.
The organizations that have an ISO 31030 Implementation in place sleep better at night. Not because a standard makes them invincible, but because when something goes wrong, they can demonstrate they took structured, documented, reasonable steps to protect their people.
The ones that don’t have it? They’re one incident away from discovering, like our client in France (not Chad or Haiti… France), that their insurance is a comfort blanket, not a safety net.
Who Actually Owns This Problem Inside Your Organization?
Here’s what we’ve observed working with US-headquartered companies over the past two decades: the person who owns the travel risk problem is almost never a security professional.
• It’s the VP of HR or benefits manager who gets the call when someone’s stranded overseas.
• It’s the COO who has to explain to the board why there was no plan.
• It’s the General Counsel who realizes the legal exposure after the fact.
• It’s the facilities director or EA who’s been booking executive travel with no idea what protections are, or aren’t, in place.
These are smart, capable people. But they’re managing risks they’re not trained for, alongside their actual job. And the gap between “we have travel insurance” and “we have a ISO 31030 Assessment” is a gap they don’t know exists until it costs them.
If they had aligned their policies with the ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard, they would have identified these issues before they escalated.
What a Proper Travel Risk Management Framework Looks Like
You don’t need to hire a Chief Security Officer and build a Global Security Operations Centre from scratch. For most companies between 1,000 and 10,000 employees, that’s overkill. What you need is a framework that’s proportionate to your risk, defensible to your insurer, and actually functional when someone picks up the phone at 2 a.m.
In practice, an ISO 31030 Consultant for a travel risk management program usually means:
- A gap analysis or maturity assessment against ISO 31030 Implementation where are you now versus where you need to be?
- A documented duty of care program that’s communicated and actually used, not a binder on a shelf.
- A fractional security function, expert guidance on call, not on payroll. A CSO and GSOC that works for you without the full-time headcount.
- 24/7 response capability, because incidents don’t happen during business hours.
- Documentation that proves you did all of this before the incident, not after.
That last point matters more than most people realize. In a legal or insurance context, what you can prove you had in place before the incident is everything.
Download: ISO 31030 Gap Assessment Checklist
A practical self-assessment tool that helps you identify where your travel risk management program stands against ISO 31030 requirements. Takes 15 minutes. Could save you millions.
The Real Cost of Getting ISO 31030 Assessment Wrong
Let’s paint two scenarios.
Scenario A: Your CEO travels to a country where the security environment shifts while they’re in town. There’s no pre-travel risk assessment, no in-country support, no crisis plan. HR is scrambling. Legal is scrambling. The board finds out from the news.
Scenario B: Same trip. But there’s a security function that flagged the risk in advance, briefed the executive, had a vetted driver and route planned, had a 24/7 operations centre monitoring the situation, and had a contingency plan ready. The executive is rerouted safely before it becomes a crisis.
Scenario A costs you reputation, legal exposure, possibly a life. Scenario B costs you a fraction of a full-time CSO’s salary, and the response may well have been covered by insurance, because you could prove your ISO 31030 Assessment was in place.
Why Sicuro Group Is the Leading ISO 31030 Consultant for Travel Risk Management
We’ve spent 20 years building Sicuro Group from a specialist operation in the UAE to a firm that operates across 140+ countries. We work from Washington DC and Dubai because the organizations that need this most, US-headquartered companies with international operations, are here.
We’re a boutique firm, deliberately. The big security companies sell a platform, a subscription, and an 0800 number. That’s a product. We deliver a relationship. We learn your business, your travel patterns, your risk tolerance, your culture. We build something that fits you, not something you have to fit into.
Preparation over panic. Relationships over paperwork. Judgment over fear.
Our ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard and tailored travel risk management solutions ensure you have a comprehensive, real-world plan for the protection of your people.
Frequently Asked Questions About Travel Risk Management and ISO 31030
In most cases, no. Standard corporate travel insurance covers medical emergencies, not security events such as political instability, civil unrest, or forced evacuations. Even policies with security riders may decline claims if you can’t demonstrate a pre-existing ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard in place. Having a duty of care program aligned with ISO 31030 ensures your organization is prepared for these scenarios.
ISO 31030:2021 is the international standard for Travel Risk Management. It provides a framework for organizations to manage the risks their people face when traveling for work. Any organization that sends employees overseas, particularly those operating in complex or volatile environments, should align their travel risk management program to ISO 31030. Implementing this standard helps ensure your team is protected against unforeseen security risks.
ISO 31000 is the overarching risk management standard. ISO 31030 was derived from it specifically to address travel risk. It provides detailed guidance on ISO 31030 Assessment, duty of care obligations, pre-travel risk assessments, in-country support, and crisis response specific to traveling employees. In short, ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard is a more targeted framework designed for managing risks faced by traveling employees, whereas ISO 31000 covers broader organizational risk management.
A fractional Chief Security Officer provides executive-level security leadership on demand without the $400,000+ salary of a full-time hire. For travel risk, this includes designing ISO 31030-aligned programs, managing crisis response, overseeing a managed GSOC, and providing the judgment and relationships that only come from experience. This role ensures that your company is prepared for any travel security risk without the need for a full-time, costly hire.
A gap assessment typically takes 2–4 weeks. From there, building a proportionate travel risk management program that’s defensible to insurers and functional in a crisis usually takes 2–3 months, depending on the complexity of your operations and the number of countries involved. The process includes aligning your policies with the ISO 31030 Travel Risk Management Standard, ensuring comprehensive coverage for your employees.
Assess your organization's travel risk management program, duty of care readiness, and business travel safety posture against ISO 31030:2021 — the international standard for corporate travel security and traveler safety.
- 7 Core Domains
- 35 Requirements
- 15 Minutes
The time to find out whether your travel insurance will actually protect your people isn’t after the incident. It’s now while you still have the luxury of choosing when and how to do it.
Scott Wilcox is an international security risk advisor and the Founder and Senior Advisor of Sicuro Group, a private security and risk management firm headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Based in Dubai, Scott Wilcox advises executives, family offices, and ultra high net worth individuals on global risk exposure, executive protection, travel risk management, and operating in complex and high risk environments. He is regularly consulted on emerging security threats and geopolitical risk and is frequently quoted by international media including Bloomberg, Financial Times, CNBC, and International Security Journal on security, travel safety, and global risk trends. Through Sicuro Group, Scott Wilcox supports clients across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia.