Attendee duty of care starts with something basic: you can’t protect people if you don’t know where they are.
Business travelers and meeting attendees are often discussed as if they were two separate groups. In most organizations they’re the same people. An employee who flies somewhere to attend a meeting, conference or event is still a business traveler.
Travel managers are responsible for duty of care for their travelers. If they can see a profiled traveler on an individual business trip but lose sight of that same employee when they travel to a meeting, the program has a real gap. You can’t claim duty of care for all travelers while meetings and events sit outside your visibility.
Knowing which airport someone flew into isn’t enough either. If an employee lands at JFK on Monday for a three-day meeting in Manhattan, the flight record doesn’t tell your security team where that person is Monday night, Tuesday or Wednesday. In many cases the hotel and room block data is more useful for duty of care.
So meeting, attendee and room-block data should flow into the same duty-of-care ecosystem as transient travel data. Planners shouldn’t have to keep another spreadsheet or run another manual process to make that happen. The technology should connect it.
Groupize addresses this through its integration with SAP Concur. Meeting and hotel information can be connected to the organization’s travel ecosystem, so the duty-of-care provider gets a more complete picture of where travelers and attendees are expected to be. The goal is to remove the artificial divide between traveler and attendee and give companies one connected view of the person.
Venue and local assessment
Risk assessment should start before a venue is selected, not after contracts are signed. The neighborhood, transportation options, accessibility, local conditions, weather, political environment and proximity to medical care can all affect attendee safety.
It has to be proportional, though. A 20-person internal meeting in Boston doesn’t need the same assessment as a 2,000-person international conference. Technology should help organizations flag the meetings that need more scrutiny rather than push every meeting through the same process.
Data security and privacy
Duty of care depends on information, but more data isn’t automatically better. Collect what you need to support the attendee, and protect access to it.
Organizations need proper security, permissions and governance around attendee and travel data. A security team may need to know who is attending an event and where it’s being held. That doesn’t mean everyone involved in planning the event should see every piece of personal information.
Enterprise security and compliance are foundational at Groupize because it works with organizations in highly regulated industries and government. Duty of care can’t come at the expense of data security.
Crisis communication and training
A crisis is the worst time to start figuring out where your attendee information lives.
Organizations should decide in advance who owns the response, who has access to attendee information, how attendees will be contacted, and at what point an incident moves from the meeting planner to the company’s security or incident-response team.
Technology can make the information available instantly. You still need clear processes and accountability for what happens next.
This is another reason meetings and travel programs need to work much more closely together. Something can happen to an attendee at the hotel, at the venue, at the airport or anywhere in between, and duty of care should follow the person through the whole trip.
Medical and incident response
Same principle: prepare before you need it. Planners should understand the venue’s emergency procedures, medical resources, emergency exits, accessibility requirements and escalation contacts.
Larger or higher-risk meetings may need dedicated medical or security staff onsite. Smaller meetings usually don’t. Either way, someone needs to know the procedure and attendees need to know how to get help.
Attendee numbers and geography call for different strategies
Duty of care should be based on risk.
Headcount matters, and geography can matter just as much. A small executive meeting in a higher-risk destination may need far more preparation than a much larger domestic meeting.
This is also why visibility across the whole meetings program matters. If an organization has hundreds or thousands of meetings happening around the world, its security team can’t manually review every spreadsheet and calendar invite. They need a consolidated view of what’s happening, where and when, and who is there.
High-profile speakers and controversial topics change the risk profile
The assessment has to go beyond the venue and attendees to include the speaker, the subject matter, possible protests or threats, social media activity, access control, and whether specialized security or coordination with law enforcement makes sense.
Certain characteristics should automatically trigger a review by corporate security. You shouldn’t rely on an individual planner to spot every risk.
Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed on December 4, 2024, outside the hotel where he was staying for their annual investor day meeting. He was walking from his hotel to the venue when he was shot.
Duty of care is a visibility problem first
The biggest issue is that attendee duty of care gets treated as an emergency-response problem. It’s a data and visibility problem first.
Duty of care should start when someone requests a meeting, long before anything goes wrong.
If meetings are registered centrally, the organization knows the event exists, where and when it’s happening, which policies apply and who’s attending. It can connect the room block and travel information and give the right stakeholders visibility before anyone gets on a plane.
That’s what Groupize is working toward: making every meeting visible and giving organizations one connected view of the meeting, the travel, the hotel and the people.
When something does happen, the first questions are always the same. Does the organization have anyone there? Who? Where are they staying? How can they be reached?
If your program can’t answer those questions for meeting attendees as quickly as it can for transient travelers, you have a gap in your duty of care.