In addition to protecting your health when you travel, also remember to protect your devices. In recent years, cybercriminals and hackers have targeted several leading travel brands, including airlines, hotel companies, IT companies, travel companies, airports and fuel suppliers. The transactional nature of the travel industry and the legacy systems on which many companies still rely heavily makes it an attractive target. These headline-grabbing attacks distract from many smaller-scale assaults – so how do you ensure that your travellers are safeguarded?

Protecting your business travellers

Many travel managers already recognise the importance of cybersecurity, placing it, together with data privacy and security in general, at the forefront of their TMC relationship. They’re tackling the issue at the RFI (request for information) stage of the bid process, no longer treating it simply as a checkmark to be dealt with later in the implementation process.

But they also need to protect their company and travellers from the active cyber threats they face daily. Tackling cybersecurity issues up-front will prevent or minimise the impact and pay dividends over simply responding to cyber incidents after the damage has been done.

Travel managers can help by ensuring travellers receive proper training to be aware of hackers’ tactics. Enforcing strict user policies, for example, ensuring any personal devices used for remote work are carefully screened for malware before being allowed to connect to any corporate network, will also help minimise threats.

Travellers have a role to play too

Travellers can expect to be the focus of cybersecurity more than ever. There are so many preventative measures that should become habitual. The list is long and growing, but there are six simple actions they can take to avoid cyber fraud both when travelling on business and in their everyday lives:

• Safeguard login credentials and watch out for anyone trying to steal a glance of them.
• Never log in to corporate accounts over free public Wi-Fi hotspots.
• Go paperless: Keep itineraries and travel documents on a password-protected mobile device.
• Don’t divulge travel dates and locations on social media.
• Look out for “phishing” emails that appear to come from airlines, loyalty programs and banks. Never divulge personal information; don’t click on any links; delete immediately.
• Change passwords frequently and use alpha-numeric combinations.

How we help you 

Technology’s evolution continues to generate new cybersecurity-related challenges. The digital world connects everything and everyone through apps, sharing of data, online purchases, services, and communications. We take the responsibility to protect the client, traveller and employee data that we hold very seriously.

Our high level of corporate governance helps maintain our reputation as a trusted partner for our customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders:

• We protect 100% of corporate and customer data and information from loss, manipulation, unauthorized access and falsification, by complying with legal provisions and by adopting international security standards such as ISO 27000 series and PCI – DSS into global security standards.
• We continuously monitor data protection laws in all the countries where we operate to update our policies, procedures and agreements relating to personal data.
• We manage protection through an interdisciplinary approach to data privacy that includes a global data protection officer, IT security specialists, and legal and privacy experts.
• In South Africa we are GDPR, PCI and POPIA complaint, so you can rest assured that you will never find your information via a Google search.