Corporate travel policies that directly address the safety and security of LGBTQ+ travelers appear to remain the exception despite an industry push over the last few years, but advocates of more inclusive travel policies say the needle still is moving in the right direction.
As it has with sustainability, Europe appears to be leading the way in developing LGBTQ+-inclusive travel policies. A June 2023 Business Travel Show poll of 262 European travel buyers showed 43 percent of their programs made provisions for the LGBTQ community. While below half, it marked an improvement of 17 percentage points from a 2022 poll, and an additional 23 percent said they planned to do so by the end of 2023, which would put it above that mark if they followed through.
Comparatively, a recent BCD Travel poll of 211 travel buyers from a more global respondent group showed only 4 percent addressed LGBTQ+ travelers in their travel policy, and the same percentage said employee resource groups, such as LGBTQ+ groups, were stakeholders in policy updates. Only 17 percent of those respondents said their policy covered the broader area of diversity, equity and inclusion—the lowest of any policy element asked about in the survey.
From the traveler perspective, a World Travel Protection-commissioned study of 1,000 adults in the U.S. and Canada who travel for business at least once a year showed that few are receiving information from their company on LGBTQ+ rights in countries that they are visiting. Only 15 percent of U.S. travelers said their company provides that information either to travelers who disclose their LGBTQ+ identity or to those who do not; in Canada, 13 percent said their company provides information to travelers who identify as LGBTQ+, while 11 percent said their company provided that information to travelers who do not.
Frank Harrison, World Travel Protection’s regional security director for the Americas, said those numbers are surprising, particularly as the LGBTQ+ community is seeing “an increased backlash” across many parts of the world, making that safety information all the more crucial. That includes not only countries that have imposed harsh criminal penalties against homosexuality, such as Uganda, but also states in the U.S. that have passed legislation that could cause problems for LGBTQ+ travelers—laws restricting transgender individuals to restrooms of the gender assigned to them at birth, for example.
“As human beings, we have to get the education and the knowledge out there,” Harrison said. “When you have many eyes that are trained to see things, they can watch each other’s backs.”
It’s a concern for travelers, too. About half of business travelers in the World Travel Protection survey, conducted by Opinium, said traveling for work is more dangerous for LGBTQ+ travelers than it is for heterosexual, cisgender travelers.
Stalled Efforts?
Considering LGBTQ+ traveler safety has been a growing topic of discussion for several years, why aren’t the numbers trending higher for policies addressing LGBTQ+ safety? Within the U.S., at least, it’s hard to ignore the larger political backlash not only against the LGBTQ+ community but also against broader corporate DEI measures. Some U.S. corporations reportedly have been scaling back their support for Pride month this year, for example, for fear of backlash from the hard right. Some states, meanwhile, are going as far as to ban DEI efforts at public universities.
Against that backdrop, some LGBTQ+ business travelers are perceiving a lack of equity at their own companies, per SAP Concur’s recently published survey of 3,750 business travelers across 24 markets. Twenty percent of LGBTQ+ travelers in that survey said they believe they’ve been denied equal opportunity for travel at their company because of their sexual orientation, and LGBTQ+ travelers were more likely than non-LGBTQ+ travelers to say they’ve been held back for such reasons as physical appearance or gender.
We’ve never seen more prominence placed on the need for proper duty of care than we’re seeing. It’s very top of mind.”
– GeoSure’s Michael Becker
Speaking in a recent BCD Travel podcast, however, Christie Connolley, the travel management company’s senior global crisis manager, offered a less nefarious explanation to slower movement in DEI initiatives.
“After 2020, that came to the fore, and now we are seeing somewhat less of a focus on it,” she said. “They think we did diversity, it’s over, and we can move on.”
Some companies still have not prioritized addressing LGBTQ+ safety in policy simply because they do not know the scope of the need within their own company, Harrison said. They might not have any out employees, which leads them to assume they have no LGBTQ+ employees.
“A lot of organizations are in a position where they can’t or don’t expect employees to tell them, and because they are not asking, they are not doing anything about it,” he said.
There are two problems with that approach, however. First, companies should never expect that any LGBTQ+ employee will self-disclose their identity no matter what sort of environment they’ve put in place. “Now matter how great your corporate culture is, there will always be employees who choose not to disclose,” Connolley said.
Second, it assumes that only LGBTQ+ employees need information and training related to LGBTQ+ safety on the road. However, it would be just as important for a heterosexual traveler, for example, to know when they are in a country with strict anti-LGBTQ+ laws if they are traveling with an LGBTQ+ colleague and inadvertently put them in danger by making a comment that outs them, such as asking about their spouse.
As such, it remains a best practice for companies not only to have LGBTQ+-specific safety information available but to ensure all employees are aware of and have access to it.
Centering Safety
Regardless of the current political environment, it has not slowed the overall corporate travel focus on duty of care, particularly amid global instability such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, GeoSure CEO Michael Becker said. Amid that focus, Becker said that he is seeing more inbound inquiries than ever on safety information specific to LGBTQ+ travelers as well as women travelers at the moment.
“We’ve never seen more prominence placed on the need for proper duty of care than we’re seeing,” he said. “It’s very top of mind.”
As such, it could be numbers are still catching up to initiatives in place, and the percentage of policies addressing LGBTQ+ traveler safety will continue to grow. Traveler responses might not fully reflect the policies in place as well, as it’s possible that companies are providing information and travelers don’t know it exists or know where to find it.
Companies have an ever-growing selection of communication tools to ensure travelers are getting the necessary information—booking tools, mail apps, internal company travel apps and duty-of-care-specific apps—to build the strategy that works best for their travelers, Becker said. One key, Harrison said, is that channels should be customizable so that travelers can be sure they are getting alerts that bear the most relevance to their needs.
That personalization—”What does risk and safety mean to me?”—will be a growing focus on duty of care in the coming years, Becker said, which will in turn enable companies to better ensure their LGBTQ+ travelers are informed and prepared on safety needs. As with so many aspects of the travel program, generative AI will bring new capabilities. Speaking at the recent Global Travel Risk Summit, which the BTN Group produces in cooperation with HospitalityLawyer.com, Connolley said technology like ChatGPT could be the “future of safety.” A traveler could, for example, identify themselves as a transgender female traveling alone to India, for example, and ask in a prompt what specific safety information she needs to know.
“It can put it into a report in just moments,” she said. “These are the risks, and this is what you need to do to avoid them.”
