The travel manager is becoming your company's risk officer
The job used to be about booking trips and controlling cost. Volatility rewrote it into something far more strategic, and most companies haven't noticed.
For a long time, the travel manager sat quietly in a corner of the org chart that nobody thought about much. The person who managed the travel program, negotiated with airlines and hotels, kept costs in line, and made sure people could get where they needed to go. Useful, unglamorous, and rarely invited to the strategic conversations.
That job is changing underneath the people doing it. And the change is bigger than most companies have registered, because the world got more dangerous and complicated in exactly the ways that turn a booking function into a risk function.
When the world gets volatile, travel gets dangerous
Think about what’s happened to the simple act of sending an employee somewhere.
Geopolitical conflict can close airspace overnight and strand people in the wrong place. A health scare can turn a routine trip into a quarantine. Political instability can make a city that was safe last month risky this month. Extreme weather, now more frequent, can collapse an itinerary and leave travelers exposed. The trip that used to be a logistics problem is now, increasingly, a safety problem.
And when your people are moving through a volatile world, someone has to own the question of their safety. Where are they right now? Are they somewhere that just became dangerous? If something happens, how fast can you find them and get them out? That’s not a booking question. That’s a risk question, and it lands, whether the title has caught up or not, on the person who runs travel.
Duty of care is not optional anymore
There’s a phrase that used to live mostly in legal departments and now sits right in the middle of the travel manager’s job. Duty of care. The obligation a company has to protect the people it sends into the world on its behalf.
It’s not a nice-to-have or a branding line. In many places it’s a legal responsibility, and the expectations around it have risen sharply. If a company sends an employee into a situation that turns dangerous, the questions afterward are pointed. Did you know the risk? Did you have a way to reach them? Did you get them out? Could you account for where every traveler was when it mattered?
Answering those questions is now part of running a travel program. It requires knowing where your travelers are in real time, being able to reach them fast, having a plan for when something breaks. The travel manager has quietly become the person responsible for the company’s answer to duty of care, which is one of the more serious responsibilities in any organization, even if the job description still says “manage the travel program.”
Cost is still there, but it’s no longer the point
Cost hasn’t gone away, to be clear. Budgets are tight, the pressure to spend less is real, and the travel manager still owns all of it. But cost has stopped being the whole job, and in the moments that matter most, it’s not even the priority.
When a crisis hits and travelers are exposed, nobody in leadership is asking whether the program saved twelve percent on airfare last quarter. They’re asking whether the company knows where its people are and can get them home. In that moment, the travel manager isn’t a cost controller. They’re the person standing between the company and a serious failure of responsibility. The job’s center of gravity has moved from saving money to managing exposure, and the second one carries far higher stakes.
Why companies should treat this seriously
Here’s where I think most organizations are behind. They still see travel management as a procurement function, a place to squeeze cost, and they staff it, resource it, and position it accordingly. Meanwhile the actual job has climbed into a category of real strategic risk, and the mismatch is a problem waiting to surface.
The company that recognizes this gives its travel function the standing, the tools, and the seat at the table that a risk role deserves. The one that doesn’t keeps treating a risk officer like a booking clerk, right up until the moment something goes wrong in a dangerous part of the world and it turns out nobody had the authority or the tools to handle it.
The title will catch up eventually. It usually does, after the reality has been true for a while. But the smart move is to see it now, before the crisis forces the recognition. The person running your travel program is quietly holding one of the more serious responsibilities in your company. Worth making sure they have what they need to carry it.
About me
I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.
A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.