On a Sunday in late January, Melinda Buchmann, who lives in Florida and oversees customer relations for RevShoppe, a 30-person remote firm that advises organizations on sales techniques and strategies, arrived in Banff, Alberta, to help set up a four-day company meeting.
On the last day of the event, her husband, Josh, director of strategic partnerships for delivery company DoorDash, who also works remotely, joined her. They spent two leisurely days hiking in Banff National Park and visiting Lake Louise.
“I’m taking advantage, because I don’t know when I’ll be back,” Ms. Buchmann said of the decision to combine downtime with a business trip.
As post-pandemic work life has changed, and arrangements now include full-time office attendance as well as hybrid and remote work, so has business travel. The phenomenon known as bleisure, or combined business and leisure travel, was initially largely embraced by digital nomads. But such combined trips are now popular with people outside this group as well. Allied Market Research, a subsidiary of Allied Analytics, based in Portland, Ore., estimated that the leisure travel market was $315.3 billion in 2022 and would reach $731.4 billion by 2032.
As workers add more and more leisure time to their business trips, companies are struggling to determine where their legal obligation to protect workers from harm — their so-called duty of care — begins and ends. And workers may think that because their trip started on business, they’ll get all the help they need if something goes wrong at the leisure end. Instead, they should generally treat the leisure portion of a trip as a regular vacation where they cover all expenses and contingencies.
Companies are responsible for knowing the whereabouts of their employees during a business trip, covering expenses in the event of an accident or emergency, securing new accommodations in the event of a hotel breakdown, and even replacing a broken-down rental car. However, it is not entirely clear whether this coverage ends completely after the conference or the last customer meeting.
Companies recognize that threats are growing, said Robert Cole, senior research analyst focused on lodging and leisure travel at Phocuswright, a market research firm. They are trying to figure out how to take care of a valuable company resource, the employee, without leaving themselves open to financial risk or potential litigation.
“Designing a comprehensive policy that balances business goals, employee welfare and legal issues can be challenging,” Nikolaos Gkolfinopoulos, head of tourism at ICF, a consulting and technology services firm in Reston, Va., wrote in an email. .
Workers may be on their own without realizing it, and may be surprised by their expenses if they need overseas hospital care or evacuation, said Suzanne Morrow, CEO of InsureMyTrip, an online travel insurance comparison site in Warwick, RI.
Ms Morrow said medical cover provided by a company “generally covers only the dates of the actual overseas business trip”. If travelers are extending the trip for personal travel, he added, “they would want to secure emergency medical coverage for that extra time abroad.”
Employers and employees are left to figure out when the business portion of the trip ends and the leisure portion begins, an important detail if an employee has a medical emergency. “Where does corporate responsibility end?” said Kathy Bedell, senior vice president at BCD Travel, a travel management company.
Companies have different policies to deal with the new travel amalgam. RevShoppe CEO Patricia McLaren, based in Austin, Texas, said the company provided flexible travel options and allowed employees to work wherever they wanted.
Even so, there are limitations. The company requires all employees, including executives, to sign liability and insurance waivers when on company-sponsored volunteer travel, such as an off-site meeting. Such waivers usually make employees responsible for their own well-being. And if they bring someone, they are responsible for that person’s expenses.
Employees are responsible for requesting paid leave and notifying their managers of their whereabouts, although this part is not a requirement. Managers must ensure adequate staffing, Ms McLaren said.
Elsewhere, workers may not bother to mention the leisure portion of their trip. Elliot Lees, vice president and managing director at ICF, said he was on trips as a child with his parents when they combined business and leisure. His parents were academics, who took vacations at conferences.
Now he does the same. “I don’t think I ever asked for approval,” he said. (The ICF does not have an official business travel policy for leisure. It is allowed as part of the personal license.) After a conference in the Netherlands last year, he spent four days hiking in the north of the country.
“I go anywhere and take more risks than I should,” he said. He said he did not carry personal travel or accident insurance.
Any indifference can quickly evaporate if a threat appears. Security experts say even low-risk locations can become high-risk for a few days or weeks of the year.
“Companies are concerned about losing visibility into the traveler if they booked flights and hotels outside of their corporate travel agency,” Benjamin Thorne, London-based senior information director for Crisis24, a GardaWorld affiliate, wrote in an email. “The company may think the traveler is in one city when, in fact, they could have booked a vacation package to another nearby city. This lack of visibility by the company makes it difficult to support travelers when a disaster strikes.”
It also brought up the possibility that “a traveler with leisure reservations and expectations may have their business trip canceled due to changes in the risk environment or company policy, disrupting their leisure plans.”
Will a company go ahead with business hours if there is a problem? “It depends on how you’re booked,” said Mr Cole, senior research analyst at Phocuswright. A rule of thumb is that the further you get from corporate control, the larger the gray area becomes.
Half of GoldSpring Consulting’s clients take responsibility for the entire journey, said Will Tate, a partner at the Cross Roads, Texas-based consulting firm and a certified public accountant. They don’t want the reputational risk. The other half say: “The business trip ended on Friday. Then we finish our duty of care.”
Some companies try to define and limit the gray area. “If you’re clearly on personal time, there’s no legal requirement for your employer to provide services,” said Nicole Page, an attorney whose practice includes employment law at Reavis Page Jump in New York.
Uber provides employees with pre-trip advice, travel assessments, travel safety advice and emergency travel assistance, including medical assistance, airport travel support, emergency and emergency assistance and personal property loss or theft insurance, whether they are on business travel either on a leisure trip or a combination.
And at DoorDash, Chris Cherry, head of global safety and security, wrote in an email that “while personal travel is not something we track, we have received requests to expand our travel support capabilities to personal travel.” Mr Cherry said that in those cases, the company has manually added employee leisure itineraries to the travel risk management system and “provides the same level of monitoring that we do for regular business travel”.
The Buchmanns plan to travel this month to Barcelona, ​​Spain for the McDonald’s World Congress. DoorDash will have a booth and Mr. Buchmann will be working the show floor and also entertaining customers.
He will be accompanied by Mrs. Buchmann. He plans to tour in the morning and work in the afternoons and evenings, Barcelona time. She will also take three days off with pay and has shared her plans with Ms McLaren, RevShoppe’s CEO.
They will stay a day after the conference and plan to visit the Dalà Theater and Museum in Figueres. “I’m sure there will be no shortage of tapas and showcases along the way,” Mr. Buchman said. He expects to return to work next Monday.
