Travel Essentials

Exit Stage Left

A few years ago, Steve Sproule was woken up by the 5 a.m. phone call no manager wants to get. One of his colleagues had been injured on the job – at a drilling rig in the Middle East.

It was an event that could have thrown Sproule into a panic: what do you do when company employees are millions of miles away and in trouble? But the phone call was from International SOS, a crisis response company in the business of bailing out business travellers.

Sproule, currently the team lead of health, benefits and retirement at Calgary-based Husky Energy Inc., has received many calls from International SOS over the years: once for a worker who sprained his ankle, once for an employee who was exposed to SARS. In every case, International SOS has handled it, kept him abreast, and asked for the authority to carry out the necessary measures.

Business travel can be a real pain, and most people have contingency plans for cancelled flights, malfunctioning PowerPoints, even jet lag. But many companies aren’t prepared for a travel emergency. We’re talking tsunamis. Heart attacks. E. coli-laced local cuisine. A gunpoint mugging.

Organizations like International SOS (others include Global Risk Solutions and iJet Intelligent Risk Systems) can help overseas travellers with everything from health issues to security problems to a lost passport. International SOS has offices and medical centres in 70 countries.

The membership fee, which starts at $88, varies depending on the services you need, which can include evacuation by air ambulance, necessary vaccinations specific to your destination, even employee tracking. “When that plane went down in the Hudson River in January, we knew we had nine companies with a total of 42 members who were on that plane, and we could immediately call their managers,” says Myles Druckman, vice-president of medical services for the Americas region.

Think your company is too small to warrant extra measures beyond insurance? Sproule believes it helps when hiring expatriates, who want to know if they’re covered. It’s also reassuring to the spouses of people who are travelling to hot spots. And if the ethical ramifications of sending people out of country without maximum preparedness doesn’t give you pause, the potential legal consequences should.

Because you don’t want to have to do what Norbert Reinhart did. Ten years ago, the owner of a small resource drilling company, Terramundo Drilling Inc., had a problem: one of his employees was being held hostage in Colombia. So Reinhart walked into the jungle and offered to trade places. The company had let its kidnapping and ransom insurance lapse a mere six months before.

Translation Software If you’re travelling to another country and don’t speak the language, you’ll want to subscribe to a translation service for your mobile device. If you own a BlackBerry, try Transclick. It can translate incoming and outgoing emails and instant messages at 400 words per second at 80% to 100% accuracy. ~$5 per mo. home.transclick.com	A Mobile Office The Nera WorldPro 1010 BGAN Terminal is a satellite phone/broadband provider. Apparently it can be dropped on concrete without breaking and can find its necessary satellite signal in under a minute. It works in the harshest conditions, so whether you’re in a snowstorm or a sandstorm, you can still email your supervisor that report. It’s also useful in other emergencies: if the office is ever destroyed by a tornado, you can pull this device out and keep on working! US $2,500 bgan.us	The Fisher Space Pen If James Bond were ever required to write, he would carry this pen. It works in temperatures down to -55 C and has been used by NASA astronauts in space and undersea divers. It’s special because most pens require gravity to feed the ink to the ball. But the ink of a Fisher pen is fed to the ballpoint by gas pressure. You can hang upside down and this pen will keep working. $70 spacepen.ca

Current Issue