Relatable Training for Secure Business Travel in a Diverse World

Andy Thompson talks with Carolyn Pearson, Founder & CEO of Maiden Voyage, a Travel Community and Risk Awareness Training provider that focuses on “Making Business Travel Safe in a Diverse World”, through gender-specific and minority groups solutions.

What is the origin of Maiden Voyage?

I was happily working in technology for ITV and I had the fortune of going on a business trip to Hollywood. My number one passion in life is to travel so I was always up for a business trip. The last time I was in L.A., I had been a backpacker aged 25. I imaged how nice it would be to be staying in a nice hotel this time round. I decided to go the weekend prior to my meetings, enjoy and LA and be rested for my meetings on Monday. However, being a business traveller is different. As backpackers, you are amongst a community of like-minded travellers. As a business traveller, you are quite isolated, really. I wanted to do fun things in the evening and some sight-seeing during the day, but it was a bit lonely and I was in a business district of L.A.  which was borderline “downtown” and so was not the safest area.

I thought it would have been so much more fun if I could have met up with other solo-travellers. We could have enjoyed a brunch or enjoyed some nice bars or restaurants. By the time my predominantly male colleagues arrived on Monday, I was climbing up the walls, wanting to get out and be entertained. It was then that I had the idea to create a social network that connected female business travellers. One of the guys said “That’s an amazing idea. You should do it” and because I articulated it, I then felt like I had to do it!

I created what was initially a social network for female business travellers to arrange to meet. Really early on, The New York Times and CNN picked up on the story and things snowballed. I still had my job, and I was tinkering around with the idea in the evenings. I looked at how I could fund it: shall I use website advertising, for example. Then it started to gather momentum. People started asking for recommendations for hotels, so I included a female-friendly hotel section on the site. It had so much attention from the press and industry that, one day, I was asked by the Duty of Care Conference if I would speak about female business traveller safety.

I was to be alongside a doctor from International SOS who was talking about Ebola. Another was to talk about al-Qaida and another outlining the ‘business of kidnap’. I thought, “How can I go there and talk about nice hotels for women?”! So, conducted a piece of research, surveying thousands of female business travellers to find out what their issues and concerns were and how well they felt supported by their employers. The statistics were quite shocking.

The audience mainly comprised security directors from Canary Wharf-type businesses. When I presented those statistics about the number of women who had experienced sexual harassment, who had not been briefed about cultural aspects of the business travel, who had been put into tricky situations, it obviously struck a chord with many of them. Some confessed “I’m ex-military. I don’t know how to have a conversation with my female business travellers about wearing a fake wedding ring, or why you might want to take extra precaution in a specific country, or why travelling to Saudi Arabia might be challenging”. Instead, when the subjects were broached, they’d had their head bitten off because they approached it like a bull in a china shop. They started to ask me if I could go into their companies and educate not just them, but also the female business travellers.

From then on, Maiden Voyage evolved from being a community to what we are today, largely a training company that provides e-learning and travel safety training. As well as going deep into the technical aspects of travel safety, we’ve also gone wide.  There is demand now from organisations who are asking us to include other aspects of diversity. We started to include more LGBTQ+ material and more recently, because of the unfortunate death of George Floyd, we’re being asked to include advice for BAME business travellers too, therefore, it made sense to introduce disabled travellers into the material as well. Our mission is Making Business Travel Safe in a Diverse World.

Did you get any pushback from the wider communities, even though they don’t need the service as much, presumably?

We were certainly challenged in the beginning. “This is sexist. Why have you invented a business that focuses on women? What about the men who are nervous about travelling?” But actually, I had the facts from the research which illustrated that there is a disproportionate number of women who are either suffering from sexual harassment or sexual assault. Of course, it happens to men as well, but not nearly on the same scale. There are also huge cultural differences around the world. Whilst we, in England, have got a very equal society, the world at large isn’t equal for women and therefore, if organisations aren’t explaining what those risks might be, then they’re failing in their duty of care.

Likewise, there are some legal restrictions in some countries. For example it was only a couple of years ago that women could not drive in Saudi Arabia and there’s still around 100 jobs that women are not allowed to do in Russia.  Handbag theft also poses problems because we carry all of our travel paraphernalia in one place. If that’s gone, then the risk increases. Pregnancy again, clearly gender based – the Zika virus for example: women who are breastfeeding; women who are trying to conceive. So I stand firm that you can’t treat all business travellers the same!

How do you deliver your training?

We have got two approaches: classroom based and eLearning. Although classroom is delivered remotely whilst the pandemic is upon us.

What I love about classroom training is that every client is different. We might be working for a European NGO delivering a course in French, that is a completely different experience to delivering a course for a tech company in Silicon Valley. We ensure that we assign trainers who have got a good understanding of the environment that the client operates in and if required their native language.

The way that we present, the things we talk about, the way we dress, the specific risks to that company’s employees, all vary massively between the type of client and the type of business they have got, their risk profile and what additional tools they have in place to support travellers.

It can be anything from a full-day training course to a two-hour workshop. We find in the big tech giant world, with a younger audience, they just don’t want to sit in a training course all day. They want a full day training course compressed into two hours! It’s a sprint, not a marathon! You’re working with people with short attention spans and busy diaries. They are highly intelligent. They like rich media such as video.  They want the key message and then to go, rather than endless detail! The challenge is to give them what they need to know in a way that that fully engages them. Conversely an NGO might be more used to the full-day training course format. They might want role-play or to physically practice some self-defence techniques.

Our eLearning is based upon our classroom content and we’ve split that into five online modules.

We cover the same subjects that we do in the classroom: situational awareness, understanding the regions that one’s travelling to, looking at the culture, the legal system. Can you trust the judicial system? How a woman or other diverse groups are received and perceived in those areas. Are there any specific restrictions for BAME / LGBTQ+ / disabled travellers? We look at things like dress codes. These courses are specific to the regions that the client’s employees travel to. There’s no point talking about the Middle East all the time if they only operate in Europe, for example. Then we look at safe ground transportation, air transport, hotel environments and how to conduct safe meetings and leisure activities. We do a little bit of self-defence, for the longer course we include predator psychology and some conflict resolution as well as social media and online safety.

That syllabus illustrates just what a huge subject this is, and what people need to understand to ensure their duty of care obligations.

It’s nice when you get a new client and show them the principal course, using that as a basis from which to adapt to their specific needs and their own company’s approach to training. With such a wide and diverse group of clients, we can make suggestions based on what worked for others who have a similar company culture. We might tone down some content and focus on certain areas in more detail.  It’s like a pick-and-mix approach. It’s the opposite of ‘one size fits all’.

You had a background in Tech. How did that translate to delivering risk management training courses?

As I progressed through my tech career, there were times where I did train and undertake “train the trainer” courses and of course I’ve done literally hundreds of speaking engagements, panels and the like, so instruction has always been really natural. But it is not just me, obviously we have a fantastic and diverse team of trainers with a variety of backgrounds. They might be ex-United Nations or G4S and we have associates who deliver all manner of subjects, including anti-land mine and medical training in high-risk, hostile environments, so they are quite seasoned trainers.

We “sheep dip” our trainers in core practices of Maiden Voyage, so there is a clear understanding of the way we do what we do. We have got certain standards for dress, the material we use, and some things are non-negotiable. Some clients work in a very specific way. For example, if you are talking about an NGO that sends people into hostile environments, they will respond better to someone who has obviously been there and speaks their language. If you have not been to the places they operate in, you’re going to lose credibility, trust and engagement really quickly.

So, we are maybe less “corporate” with those types of clients. We try to have a happy medium with a core Maiden Voyage approach and “global versus local”, accounting for the culture of the client. That is why every training client that we get is like developing a new product and that’s what keeps it exciting for us as well. You are far more likely to have impact if you adjust for the culture of the client. In the NGO world, particularly.

You mentioned that your focus shifted from a “social network” to delivering risk management. What is your look ahead, in terms of the trends? How do you see the market evolving?

From a travel perspective, “duty of care” had a really good run, in terms of being flavour of the month. About 18 months to two years ago, “traveller well-being” took over. It was all about mindfulness, meditation, exercise, healthy eating whilst travelling.

However, COVID-19 has welded those two things back together again. You cannot have one without the other when you’re operating within the backdrop of a pandemic. There are some specific security duty of care aspects that are really prevalent now, incorporating both physical and mental health. Most people are coming up to a year since their last business trip and naturally their worlds have shrunk. They are staying at home with their families and they have got a new routine. They may not be waking up with an alarm clock anymore and therefore, business travel, when it resumes, is going to be a shock to the system. Some people who were maybe really comfortable about travelling before, are now not – they may well be nervous or have separation anxiety or they might have real health concerns. They might be worried about getting stuck somewhere if borders close, so I do see traveller wellbeing and duty of care working really nicely, hand-in-hand.

There are a number of companies now providing Travel Risk Management Awareness Training. What is your competitive differentiation?

We never set out to be a “Travel Security” business. Our core values are still the same and we remain committed to helping to tackle the gender based challenges and the day-to-day risks facing other minority groups of business travellers. Realistically most companies are sending people to New York, London, Hong Kong or Amsterdam, not to conflict zones. If you come at it from that military perspective – believing you are going to get blown up and kidnapped every five-minutes, it sends the wrong message. Realistically, 99.99% of business travellers are not going to be in that situation, and they will never experience it.

That is why it works so well for us. I have not come from a military background, like so many in the physical risk management world. I have come from a practical background where I did travel a lot of business travel. I worked in tech. I am female. I lived and breathed a lot of those challenges that our travellers are facing. We will always have our point of difference. We are well-known for that diversity angle, proven by the fact that we are frequently asked to contribute to speaker panels, TV and radio, on the subject.

Whilst we have “competition” in this market, nobody does exactly what we do. We have had people chip away at the community aspect and we have had traditional “hard core” security companies say that they do female traveller safety training, but we have a uniqueness and credibility they may not have, by virtue of our approach.

I was previously challenged by a male security trainer, “I don’t see why it needs to be women training women about sexual violence. I am perfectly equipped to do that. Men get raped as well”. His attitude was quite astounding. I just do not see how a man could relate to the women in the room talking about how they might feel. How would he know?  When I’m in a strange city, my predominant concern is sexual harassment or sexual assault my male colleagues just don’t live with that as a day-to-day concern.

That person’s inability to identify their own inability to relate is a real problem!

Yes, and because we’ve started to include BAME training, I’ve been really conscious of the fact that I’m white and therefore I’ve just been running a working group with members of the BAME community around the world to get them to share with me what their experiences are, what the risks are and how they would recommend mitigating them.

At each stage, if there is anything that I want to do for a diverse group that I do not belong to, I test it back with those communities. We have consultants who work with us from the disabled traveller and LGBTQ+ perspective so that we can approach these issues from their standpoint. That includes sharing real-life case studies of people who belong to those minority groups.

Is Traveller Safety Awareness seen as a tick box exercise?

I am on the Global Business Travel Association Risk Committee.  We’ve had the privilege of early sight and input into the new ISO standard for travel risk management [ISO 31030]. It’s encouraging to see that draft recommends a lot of what is already included in our traveller safety training.

Companies have a duty of care obligation to their employees who likewise have a “duty of loyalty” obligation to not bring the company into disrepute or put themselves or their colleagues at risk. Employers might wish to mandate that all travellers take some training before they start to travel on business. Our eLearning service comes with a training record feature so that a company can monitor who’s done the training and when the refresher training is due.

COVID-19 has pushed more organisations to mandate traveller safety training. We recently developed a COVID-19 travel safety eLearning module and we are seeing organisations  insisting that their travellers take this e-learning before they travel.

Are companies who don’t mandate but are still giving their employees the opportunity to take a course at their discretion, still achieving their duty of care?

If something was to happen, for example a business traveller was killed or seriously injured there would be an investigation. That investigation would look at if and how that company had taken all reasonable steps to protect or to safeguard that business traveller. It’s not just in the practical sense of the journey – did they put them in a bad choice of hotel or insist that they use public transport late at night – but, actually, did they prepare that traveller adequately in advance. Risk assessments and training are two practical things that employers can do to prepare their travellers.

That’s the problem with it being a tick box exercise – this is all optional. So typically, some organisations like what we do, they think it’s novel, they like us and the culture, but they don’t have to do it. In some instances, companies only come to us when something’s happened.

Your services are widely applicable, but who are your core target markets?

Any company that sends business travellers on business and particularly if that travel is overseas. We have clients in the oil and gas industries, universities, Silicon Valley tech giants, pharmaceutical companies, banks… but clients come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve got a solution for an SME with three employees that can buy an eLearning licence for £20, up to some of the world’s biggest organisations that can buy unlimited e-learning licenses.

The COVID-19 eLearning module was off-piste for us, but we created a 12-minute animation and that covers everything that a business traveller needs to know to make sure that they’re safe travelling during the pandemic. It comes with the Managers Handbook for line Managers, travel managers, health and safety and HR professionals, helping them to make sure that they have created the right environment for their employees to be safe and well. Clients are telling us that whilst they can have conversations with individual travellers right now because there’s only a handful going, once they’ve got tens or hundreds or thousands of people going, they can’t do that. They know that people typically don’t read guidelines or long bland policies so actually an animation has been an engaging way for people to get that information.

Notwithstanding the reduction in the global travel industry, what challenges have you faced?

The biggest challenge is what we just spoke about – that’s it’s not considered essential by many and I’m not a hard-nosed salesperson! I’m a techie, I’m a feminist. I love to travel and to empower and liberate others to see the world. All of those cool things, but not somebody who enjoys trying to convince somebody that they need our solution. When I started Maiden Voyage, I just wanted to create a social network to connect business travellers – and this thing grew arms and legs and therefore we had to sell to cover our costs! I was almost an accidental entrepreneur! The solution isn’t an ‘essential purchase, clients only have a moral obligation to buy it and there’s usually lots of competition for that pot of money. If I had to come at it from the perspective of understanding how I can make money, I would probably have picked a product that already existed in the market rather than trying to break a new one!

How can you measure the impact of what you are doing?

The biggest impact that I see is that when somebody has been on a business trip and I speak to them afterwards and they say, “I thought of you when I was in my hotel the other day, because now I always put the double lock on the door” or “I thought of you when the guy on the train next to me was rubbing his leg up against mine”. They’ve taken evasive action or they’ve done something different because of this – they picked up something from me in conversation or they’ve been on one of my training courses. I think that that’s actionable insight, really, that they have done something on the back of what I’ve told them.

Where have you got the delivery wrong?

When we started to expand from purely female to LGBTQ+, we were probably a little bit tokenistic, so we would sprinkle in bits from the communities rather than going wholesale. We want to maintain a best-in-class product which caters for all aspects of diversity, therefore we probably should have invited people to come on the journey with us earlier, rather than trying to adapt a female product for a wider group of diverse communities

It’s equally about having the money and the time to develop the products as well. When you’re bringing a new product to a new market, it is a gamble. When we developed the COVID-19 e-learning, we didn’t know for sure if people would buy it. We just did the very best job that we possibly could, involved a lot of experts in developing the material then put it out there. It succeeded but, likewise, we could have developed a turkey at any point. How much money do you invest to find out that something’s not right? There’s a difference between people saying, “I like that, I’d buy that”, and them actually putting their hand in their pocket to pay for it.

What should people be looking for in their Travel Risk training provider?

They should be looking for a cultural fit. Are the company’s values, customs, norms, in line with their own and are the trainers representative of the people that they’re training? Are they relatable? One thing to avoid is assuming that you can get everything from one supplier. If you’ve got a contract with a big risk management organisation, you may think it might be easier just to have them train your travellers as well. Avoid thinking that “big is always better”. Look at niche providers, who might be able to be more flexible and more relevant.

Have you come across any highly unusual circumstances during your training delivery?

I was doing some training for the government years ago and it was in a huge meeting room a hotel. The room had a strange chill running through it. As I was training, I kept seeing the tea and coffee man coming in and out to attend to the refreshments at the back of the room.

He seemed to come and go too many times and as the back of the room was dimly lit, I began to question myself as to whether he was actually coming in or was I imagining it, “maybe the light was playing tricks?” I mentioned it to one of the delegates afterwards. She had thought the same and was also feeling the eerie chill. It transpired that the tea and coffee man hadn’t actually been in and out all those times at all. When we handed the keys back to reception we remarked on the strange experience in the room and it was that point that a very ashen looking member of staff confessed that that part of the hotel was thought to be haunted. I was more intrigued than scared to be honest. In a conversation with the hotel manager some time later, he also relayed some ghostly goings-on in the hotel.

As a training company, who do you admire in the training market as a stand-out company?

Livewire really stands out for me. Specialists in the retail, hospitality, concierge and customer service industries are brilliant. Their courses are always really vibrant, energetic and engaging.  They bring a fun approach to what they do with music, games, even some dressing up!  We all know that people learn better when they are having fun.

In our sector, we have recently collaborated with Pilgrims Group. It worked really well with Pilgrims’ because, whilst I see my approach as a “heart based” business, they are a “head based” business. They’re known to be one of the best in the business for hostile environment training and in particular for the media industry. I found them to be just highly organized, straight-forward, process driven and well put together.

Carolyn can be contact via email at carolyn@maiden-voyage.com or visit Maiden Voyage

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