Winging It: Some companies were ready for swine flu

Even if Joe Biden's family stayed close to home last week, there's strong evidence that most business travelers weren't letting a flu epidemic keep them from their appointed rounds.

We know of at least one good reason for that. In the last six years, since two previous global epidemics of other types of flu got their attention, many companies and organizations with travelers hopping around the globe have prepared better for just the situation we're in now.

Of course, the confidence that many travelers seem to have at the moment could evaporate quickly if the A(H1N1) flu, or swine flu, gets a lot worse.

At the same time, the flu outbreak's effect on the travel business is going to be hard to separate from what the recession has done since last fall. Airlines and hotels worldwide have seen precipitous declines in business, including 10 percent to 15 percent plunges in passenger miles flown and hotel occupancy levels this year compared with last.

The U.S. airlines with the most service to Mexico, American and Continental, reported sharp drops in travelers going south and full planes coming north. Continental halved the number of seats it was trying to fill by scrubbing flights from its schedules or using smaller aircraft on certain routes.

By the end of the week, the travel industry was collecting its thoughts and measuring the impact.

The Air Transport Association trade group quickly rebuked Vice President Biden last week for saying his advice would be the same he'd tell his family: Avoid travel, especially in contained places like an airplane or a subway. The group said would-be travelers should stay home only if they were sick and asserted that airline cabins have cleaner air than most public buildings.

But Sabre Holdings, the parent of the Travelocity online service and the largest of the travel-agency bookings systems, said in a statement that except for flights to Mexico, it was not seeing any significant reductions in bookings.

You'll recall that many businesses were caught without a plan for protecting their travelers when SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, erupted in Asia in 2003. More companies adopted plans after the 2005 outbreak of avian flu in Asia looked as if it could develop into a full-blown pandemic.

Last week, a survey of members of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives found that almost two-thirds of the companies represented now have a pandemic-emergency plan that covers the evacuation or hospitalization of their travelers in a country facing an outbreak.

Almost three-quarters of the companies said they had made provisions for employees to work from home or another remote location in case of an outbreak in the country where they are based. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed said their companies had regularly updated their emergency-preparedness plans over the last six years.

"This initial survey of global business travel managers indicates that levels of corporate preparedness are quite high going into this crisis, with a majority of companies showing confidence in their contagion and pandemic plans," said Susan Gurley, the association's executive director, in a statement.

The survey found that only 3 percent of the travel managers worked for companies that had restricted employee travel to Mexico or the United States, and only 7 percent had restricted travel to any country with reported cases of A(H1N1) flu.

The National Business Travel Association was also surveying its members last week to see how they were responding, but complete survey results were unavailable.

The sheer volume of information about the current outbreak may also be helping companies learn what to do. The Business Travel Coalition, the Radnor advocacy group for travel managers, created a free "dashboard," or central place on its Web site, with news and advice (http://www.netvibes.com/btc#Flu).

Since the SARS and avian-flu outbreak, more organizations have looked for help with their emergency plans to companies such as International SOS Assistance Inc., the worldwide emergency-aid and security service that has its North American headquarters in Trevose.

Myles Druckman, International SOS's vice president for medical services, told me that the company last week conducted four Web-based seminars, each with hundreds of clients taking part, to update them on the latest news.

Druckman, who was at a corporate medical directors' conference in San Diego when news broke about the current epidemic, said what he observed there showed how some companies were better prepared than others. Many companies started developing preparedness plans four to six years ago, but had not been working hard on them recently, he said.

"When avian flu seemed to fall out of the news, they put their plans on hold," Druckman said. "At least they'd gone through the process and started planning. But now, they're a little bit behind the eight-ball in trying to track the progress.

For some companies at the conference, he added, "they just dusted off their plans, and it was working. Those that hadn't planned were scrambling."