With travel, a chock-full agenda and being surrounded by others, it is inevitable that someone is going to get sick during your event. Attendees work hard and play hard when at a meeting, conference or event. This can drain their immune system. Minimize the impact with these quick tips:

• Think of illness and accidents in the site selection phase. Items to consider include access to hospitals or an on-site physician and diseases/viruses impacting the area.
• As part of the registration process, make emergency contact details a requirement. Collect the name, phone number, alternate phone number and email of their designated contact. You should also collect if they need an ADA-compliant room or have any dietary health requirements.
• During the pre-meeting stage, include communication to attendees reminding them to bring any prescription or over-the-counter medications with them. If the meeting is abroad, make sure attendees understand how to legally travel with medications. You should also have attendees check into medical insurance for travel overseas.
• Before you arrive on-site, prepare or purchase a first aid kit.
• It is best practice to become CPR-Heimlich Maneuver-AED certified in case of an emergency situation needing immediate response.
• Try to incorporate some health/wellness initiatives into your meeting or event to minimize the chance of illness. If possible, incorporate immunity-boosting foods into the menu. A juice bar is camouflaged as a trendy, in-the-moment perk, while secretly providing sickness-fighting vitamins.
• When selecting activities, keep your attendees in mind and avoid any activities that have a high-risk for injury or accidents. Work with your DMC or meeting planner to obtain necessary documentation on the activity and its safety level.
• As part of your on-site contact list, include any on-site or on-call medical personnel, addresses and directions to the nearest hospitals and emergency phone numbers. Also locate on-site first aid relief and defibrillators. Include clear instructions on what to do/where to go should an emergency situation arise.
• If after all of this, you still face a medical situation, remember you are the attendee’s friendly face. Do what you can to support them through the illness or injury and get them the medical attention they need.

Sources:

The 3 “A”s of Risk Management

Legal Briefs: 6 Ways to Protect Your Meetings

5 Steps to Managing Meetings Risk

This article is part of a series, identifying an area of risk and providing steps on how to minimize the threats these risks pose.

Alcohol and Recreational Marijuana

The only way to remove potential liquor liability from your event is to not serve alcohol to begin with. But let’s be honest. Most of the time, this isn’t an option. So how do you reduce the chance of risk related to alcohol? Here are some steps to follow for alcohol related risk management:

1. Protect yourself in the contract: During the very initial stages of planning your event you can limit your vulnerability to risk by including certain clauses in the contract with your hotel, event facility or anywhere else alcohol will be served. The most important clause to include is an indemnification clause. This clause should be included in all contracts, regardless of whether there will be alcohol served. You can also add that servers should be trained in safe alcohol service, the hotel will adhere to all federal and state laws regarding the sale of alcohol and bartenders/servers are not to serve attendees who appear to be intoxicated.
2. Have proper insurance: Before purchasing a liquor-liability insurance policy, review your company’s general liability policy. If the policy does not cover events where alcohol is served, look into a liquor-liability policy. This won’t completely eliminate your liability, but it will cover some situations. Lastly, confirm your venue/vendors are properly insured and licensed.
3. Develop policies and guidelines: Be proactive about expectations on alcohol consumption at events. Let attendees know ahead of time to have fun at the event, but also to drink and behave responsibly. If someone does get out of control, have guidelines already in place on how to handle intoxicated guests. You can set these guidelines not only for your on-site team, but also with the servers/bartenders. If possible, give a third-party (like your catering manager) authority over the event. If someone has obviously had too much to drink, you can notify this designated individual to handle the situation, always with tact. This can relieve you from resistance from the attendee as well as potentially awkward or embarrassing scenarios if a VIP or client is involved.
4. Provide a safe environment: The best way to discourage overindulgence and protect yourself from risk is to create an atmosphere that promotes responsibility and safety. Never offer alcohol during activities involving snow, water or transportation (think jet skiing). For other events, prevent your guests from becoming intoxicated by setting it up in way that does not promote overconsumption.

A few tips are:

• Offer drink tickets instead of an open bar.
• Offer non-alcoholic beverages. Variety and creativity will be more attractive than basic sodas.
• Always serve food when alcohol is served. Eating slows down the absorption of alcohol. Limit salty foods; they make people thirstier.
• Close your bar before the end of the event. This will give attendees the chance to sober up.
• Station the bar in a location that isn’t constantly in guests’ paths.
• Ensure bartenders are using jiggers to consistently measure their pours.
• Keep drinks at the bar. If you have servers circulating with drinks or refilling glasses, many people will accept even if they weren’t planning on having more.
• Even with all these measures in place, there is still the chance someone over indulges. Make sure you have transportation available for those unfit to get themselves home or back to their hotel room. This could be a bus, or be as simple as having taxis available or walking them up to their room.

The above steps should give you a good defense against liquor liability. But there is another culprit for liability cropping up across the nation, recreational marijuana. Although it is only legal in eight U.S. states so far (Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Washington, D.C.), it is important to consider the implications this substance has to your meetings.

The best defense is to develop a policy regarding pot use at your events. If your company’s overall policy doesn’t touch on this subject, be sure to have something in place. A strong policy will not only protect you during events held in states where it has been legalized, but also in states where it is still illegal. Sooner or later, you will meet in a state where weed has become decriminalized, and chances are, you will have at least one participant who might give it a try. Just like with any type of risk management, think of all possible outcomes and have a plan in place for how you will react.

Sources:
MeetingsNet: Seven Tips to Limit Liquor Liability
Strategic Meetings Management Consulting: Alcohol Risk Management
MeetingsNet: Stirring the Pot: What Planners Need to Know About Marijuana Liability
MeetingsNet: 5 Weird Ways Legal Marijuana Could Affect Your Events
Business Insider: Here’s where you can legally smoke weed now

This may seem obvious, but when you leave your home country you’re subject to the laws and regulations of the country you’re visiting – from the moment you enter the front door. A security concern that not everyone thinks about can occur at border crossings. Depending on where you are traveling to, electronic devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets and digital cameras may be subject to official government review as well as, in some cases, duplication of your hard drives and other storage media. Privacy concerns don’t end at the border, however. Depending on what country you’re in you may also expose your devices to viruses, activity tracking and other software simply by being in the country and connecting to its networks.

We talk a lot about data security for travelers on this site and all of that information should apply here as well. Check out a few of them here:

• 6 ways to protect yourself against data breach
• So what the heck’s a chip card anyway?
• Don’t throw away that old boarding pass! Here’s why.

While there’s no specific list (at least that we could find) of countries that can take a look at and potentially snoop, seize or copy data from your devices, there are reports that it can and does happen all over the world.

Whether you’re entering a country by air or traveling between countries by car, boat, train, foot, skis (in the unlikely event that James Bond is reading this), hoverboard (in the less likely event that a 12 year-old is reading this), winged horse, TARDIS, trained dolphin team or Uber, it’s a good idea to take some steps before you arrive to ensure that your personal and corporate data is protected from the minute you arrive to the minute you leave. Here are some tips on how to do that:

Encrypt
Encrypt the information on your laptop to ensure that your data remains hidden to unauthorized access. Both Microsoft and Apple offer tools to accomplish this. Just don’t forget your password! You might already have this activated if you use a company device. If so, be sure to check with your IT or corporate security department to get more information before traveling internationally.

Back up
Did you spend your flight crafting the perfect presentation? Make sure you’re able back it up to the cloud while in the air or as soon as you land – just in case your laptop is seized and searched. How about all those photos on your smartphone? Have you backed those up? There are services like Apple iCloud and Google Photos that make it easy. Run that backup before you leave home and again in every country you visit – but then pay attention to the next section!

Sign out
Clear your browser history and delete cookies from your web browsers that may still be signed into email, social media sites, etc.

Sign out of apps on your smartphone and tablet that might contain personally identifiable or sensitive information. This might include social media apps, email apps, notes apps like Evernote and Notes, storage sites like Google Drive and Dropbox, calendars and more. You might just delete the apps altogether. You can get them back when you return.

Do you have a fingerprint reader on your device? Temporarily disable that or reboot your phone prior to arriving at the border so that a password/PIN is required. Here’s how to disable Touch ID on the iPhone or iPad.

Consider alternate devices
If you can manage, don’t take your brand new expensive Macbook or Surface Pro tablet along with you on the trip. Bring along a cheaper device instead such as a low cost Windows laptop or a Chromebook that won’t make you shed tears if it disappears. Make sure it’s new or has been wiped (erased and reloaded like new) before you go. That will limit exposure to to only the time period with which you’re traveling.

The same thing goes for your phone. Do you have an old phone you can take along rather than your primary device? Maybe go old school and consider a “dumb phone” for your trip – just pretend that it’s 2006 again! Yeah, I know that’s no fun and could be terribly inconvenient. It’s just something to consider depending on where you’re traveling.

If you’re carrying corporate devices, keep the number of your travel department, corporate security, or IT department handy (and not on your phone) so that devices can be remotely locked or even wiped should they be taken and accessed by government officials – or anyone else for that matter.

Whatever devices you bring, be sure they have the latest updates and security patches installed. When you return home, have your devices wiped and reset to ensure that no viruses or otherwise nefarious software has been installed.

This article was originally published by Travel & Transport. The original article can be read here.