Business Travel Safety Through Covid-19 and Beyond

As a business travel technology company, Deem is sensitive to the impact of safety issues — and during this last year, the pandemic — on our industry and people, especially in those critical industries where people needed to continue traveling despite the risks. Traveling medical professionals, HVAC technicians and others faced significant threats from a novel virus with unclear transmission methods to help others — truly heroic and inspiring actions.

As the pandemic changed our entire industry and the world, we asked: What’s needed to ease anxiety and help people continue traveling? Is the data we’re offering a unique service, and is it helping people make better decisions faster?

This was the catalyst for Travel SafetyCheck, the feature in our Etta business travel booking and management platform that offers health and safety information directly in the booking flow, where travelers need it most.

Before SafetyCheck, travelers’ options to find health and safety information were limited to searching through each travel provider’s website, which can be time consuming and disruptive. Or company travel managers were investing a lot of time trying manually to stay ahead of the rapidly changing rules of travel during a pandemic, which can lead to missed details, costly mistakes, and significantly reduced productivity for travel managers. Or, collecting the information was so cumbersome that travelers may have stayed home, which could undermine their business and careers.

Designed, developed, and deployed in just 90 days, SafetyCheck is highlighted in each phase of booking on our Etta platform — air, hotel, and car — so travelers can easily find information such as cleaning protocols, regulations, safety scores for hotel neighborhoods, maps of Covid-19 historical and current caseloads, and more.

Some other business travel booking platforms offered separate dashboards or “crisis” webpages; just one offered very limited information in its booking flow. We wanted to create a more actionable duty of care solution for companies than was available. No other business travel booking and management platform offers the comprehensive level of information within its booking flow that Deem includes in Etta.