The purpose of the Travel Risk Map is to help organisations better understand the risks in the markets where they operate and travel.

It displays each country’s medical risk rating and travel security risk rating, providing a comprehensive overview of risks by destination. This should highlight to organisations the need for travel risk mitigation efforts.

Countries are marked in terms of three different criteria: medical, security and road safety.

According to the Map, the most dangerous countries in the world for travel are all in Africa: Libya, Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

On the other side of the coin, the safest countries, according to International SOS, are Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Andorra and Svalbard.

International SOS also brought together a group of representative experts of all health, security, and safety fields relevant to the risks of travelling and work abroad to form the Travel Risk Management (TRM) Council. Together the two parties forecast the top 10 health and security risks that organisations should be prioritising in 2020.

These are: risks borne from geopolitical shifts; mental health issues; physical health; cybercrime; climate change; infectious disease outbreaks; the debate about whether an employer is responsible to cover ‘bleisure’ as part of employee duty of care; millennials and Generation Z entering the workplace with different preferences, expectations and attitudes to risk; an increase in high-profile duty of care legal cases; and the challenges under-resourced and inexperienced startups and SMEs may face in meeting duty of care obligations.

With risks explicitly mapped out, hopefully employers can arm themselves with knowledge that will help them to protect their travelling employees.