5 Takeaways from ASIS Europe’s Future of Travel Risk Management Workshop
Security practitioners from around the world gathered in March at ASIS Europe 2025 in Dublin, Ireland, to discuss trending security topics and challenges.
One of those topics was travel risk management (TRM), which has been top of mind for many security practitioners as business travel gets back to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels. The changing regulatory environment for duty of care and evolving geopolitical tensions are becoming major factors in TRM, says Eric Davoine, CPP, group head of physical security and safety at AXA.
At ASIS Europe, Davoine, who is also the vice-chair on the ASIS European Board of Directors, facilitated a working group session, “The Future of Travel Risk Management,” an interactive workshop where participants were briefed on visions of the future of TRM from different stakeholders, including Seerist, Safeture, Crisis24, PwC, and International SOS, before pivoting to a collaborative session.
After the workshop wrapped, Davoine spoke with Security Technology about some of the main takeaways.
1. Travelers Want More Info
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many travelers are being more proactive about their travel and safety concerns. Although security briefings remain standard, Davoine says that many employees will now also research their intended destination for a work trip and come to him or his team with their concerns.
For instance, employees who are pregnant have raised questions about the safety of the location they are planning to travel to and what his advice might be for their trip.
“We see some questions that were not raised before,” says Davoine, referring to the pandemic. “People are taking more care of their own safety in this case, and more consideration or being more proactive.”
2. There are Opportunities for AI
Organizations are beginning to use artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their normal workflows, and there are potential use cases for TRM. During the working group, Davoine says that a presenter showed how AI could be used to create customized TRM briefings for employees—which could be helpful for multinational companies that have thousands of employees with diverse needs and risk profiles.
Davoine says he relates to this need since his company has 30,000 travelers each year but tends to rely on one model of training and briefing for each trip. He is pushing his team and the vendors it works with to create a more tailored approach to pre-travel briefings and training so they relate more to the unique risk profile of each traveler.
“The diversity topic for us is very important in TRM because when you are sending abroad someone who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, depending on the country where you send this person you may put them at risk because in some countries homosexuality is forbidden by the law. If you send a traveler who is not aware, you may put them at risk,” Davoine says. “Offering an active TRM means that I will explain to people based on who they are and what they need.”
This doesn’t mean, however, asking employees if they identify as LGBTQ+. Instead, Davoine says it might mean providing a series of options for employees to self-select through a training module to pick the TRM content that is most applicable to them without disclosing their private information to their employer.
3. Regulatory Mindsets are Shifting
For Davoine, COVID-19 changed crisis management, but it hasn’t posed as many ramifications for duty of care. Instead, different interpretations of regulations are changing travel risk management and duty of care more swiftly.
“The regulation is not changing dramatically, it’s more the mindset of people—in general—and the way regulations are being applied,” Davoine says. “Years ago, it was not common to have an employee suing his company. However, now it’s pretty much normal if something happens that you’re not going to end with bargaining with your company and a check. You’re going to sue the company for the sake of its liability.”
For instance, Davoine’s company is headquartered in France and has employees who work in more than 60 countries, all of which may have their own regulations about duty of care. To attempt to stay in line, Davoine says that his company sets the bar for duty of care above what may be required by local statutes to abide by French regulations.
Duty of care requirements are also further complicated by a rise in bleisure travel—where employees add personal travel to an existing business trip. Right now, it is unclear if an employee’s vacation tacked on to a work trip falls under a company’s duty of care responsibilities.
“We currently think, based on some judgements and judges’ decisions, that the reason why the person was in this country was a business trip,” Davoine says. “As soon as it’s framed by a plane ticket taken by the company, we can consider—and in our company for our duty of care—that the person is under our responsibility.”
This means that personal travel combined with a business trip has to be validated by the security team. The employee also might be required to share their personal travel itinerary—such as specific sites they are planning to visit and hotels they are planning to stay in while on their personal travel—so that the security team continues to be aware of their location and potential risk exposure.
4. Intelligence Collection is Sometimes Inadequate
TRM relies mainly on two types of intelligence. The first is long-term intelligence that is used for pre-trip assessments, which requires information on the last month and the past few years to build a risk profile of the destination country, city, and district. The second type is real-time intelligence—which is used to warn a traveler when an event or incident has occurred that could be a threat to them.
Several participants in the working group brought up the challenges associated with collecting accurate intelligence, particularly during a period of misinformation and disinformation, Davoine says.
“Years ago, it was complicated to get information,” Davoine adds. “Now, it’s not very complicated to get information. We have too much information, so we have to analyze and segregate this information.
“On top of that, we have to check the information because now with deepfakes, bots, bot farms of information, etcetera, what we can see may not be right,” he continues. “We have to challenge the sources and assess whether the source can be trusted or not.”
This glut of information about a particular location is not universal, though. Major travel destinations like Paris, London, or New York City might have an excess of publicly available data to sort through, while more remote sites in Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, or South Sudan might have limited social media information available to glean intelligence from due to limited access to these networks.
“If you are sending someone to the South Sudan area or the Abyei, which is the region between Sudan and South Sudan, people are not sharing what happens on X—they just don’t have it. We need to find other ways of intel gathering,” Davoine says.
During the working group, attendees spoke about addressing this challenge now and how they are cross-checking sources to guarantee information is coming from several different sources—not just copied and pasted from one website to another without analysis—to ensure they are providing the right information that is relevant to travelers.
5. Geopolitical Tensions Have Personal Ramifications
Another major topic discussed in the working group was how geopolitical tensions are affecting individual travelers. During the workshop, participants spoke about scenarios of sending a U.S. citizen to Hong Kong and the potential level of risk associated with that travel.
Davoine adds that the most targeted travelers currently are U.S. citizens and French citizens, and targeting typically has nothing to do with the business of the company they represent.
“In this case, people are a victim of the struggles between their home country and they country they have visited, and they are just being used as money to be exchanged in a bargaining process,” Davoine says. “It’s difficult because you can give advice, but as soon as they’re in the country, they are in the hands of the local government and could be arrested without any notice—without having committed any crime—just because they are a citizen of a country which is an intense relationship with the visited one.”
This trend of wrongful detention of international travelers really began to uptick about four years ago following Canada’s arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer on behalf of the United States. Since then, there have been several high-profile cases in Russia, Davoine adds.
For more on ASIS Europe and future European security events, visit its website.
Megan Gates is editor-in-chief of Security Technology. Connect with her at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.
