Duty of Care When an Employer Books Employee Travel

What the phrase is pointing at

Duty of care is used loosely in travel management, but the underlying idea is straightforward: an organisation that sends people somewhere has responsibilities for their safety while they are there, and those responsibilities do not disappear because a third party is doing the driving.

British health and safety law places general duties on employers in relation to work activities, and work-related road risk has been a recognised area of guidance for many years. The specific application depends on circumstances, so this is general context rather than legal advice and organisations should take their own guidance.

Why ground transport is easy to overlook

Flights and hotels get scrutinised because they are booked centrally and cost visible money. The car at either end is often arranged by whoever is travelling, on a personal app account, and expensed afterwards. It disappears from the organisation's view entirely.

That matters because road travel is where a large share of the actual risk in a business trip sits, and because an employee arranging their own transport at two in the morning in an unfamiliar city is making a risk decision alone.

What reasonable diligence looks like

None of this requires a large programme. It requires knowing a few things about the supplier and being able to show that they were considered.

• Confirmation that the operator, drivers and vehicles are properly licensed
• Confirmation that motor cover is appropriate for carrying paying passengers
• An understanding of how drivers are vetted and how that is kept current
• A view on fatigue management for long or unsociable itineraries
• A route for the traveller to raise a problem, and for it to reach the employer

Knowing where people are, proportionately

Duty of care includes being able to locate travellers if something happens, which pushes towards centrally arranged travel and some form of journey record. It also runs into privacy, because detailed movement data about employees is personal data and collecting everything possible is rarely justified.

The workable position is to hold what is genuinely needed for safety and cost purposes, be transparent with staff about what is recorded, and agree with the provider what reporting flows back rather than accepting whatever a system produces by default.

Writing it into policy without over-engineering it

A short section in a travel policy does most of the work: which categories of journey must be booked through an approved provider, what standards a provider must meet, when self-service booking is acceptable, and who to contact if something goes wrong during travel.

The test is whether an employee travelling alone at an awkward hour knows what to do and has a supplier behind them who will answer. If the answer is yes, the policy is doing its job regardless of how long the document is.

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