Episode 12: New International Travel Guidelines Resource

Make sure you’re addressing all possible international travel risks with URMIA’s International Travel Guidelines, a new resource that will be continuously updated by URMIA’s International Committee. A kind of risk checklist for higher education risk managers, its purpose is to provide an overview of every kind of global travel risk imaginable. Join Mike Gansor, risk manager at West Virginia University, who led the effort to develop the document, and Gary Langsdale, URMIA education manager and university risk officer (retired) of The Pennsylvania State University, as they chat with host Jenny Whittington about how the guidelines were developed, what’s covered, and how you can provide feedback to help update the resource.

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Transcript

Jenny: Welcome to URMIA Matters! This is Jenny Whittington, URMIA’s Executive Director, and I’m pleased that you all are joining us today. Today we have two special guests with us. First up we have Mike Gansor from West Virginia University. Mike is a long time URMIA member; he was the parliamentarian for many years. So, Mike, I’m going to welcome you first, and please give us a little bit of background about yourself, your position at West Viginia, and your involvement with URMIA. Welcome Mike. 

Mike: Hi Jenny, thank you very much. My position is Risk Manager here at West Virginia University. I’ve been here since 1997, so 22 and some odd months, 22 years I guess and some months, and my time with URMIA I was involved for almost 10 years as a parliamentarian, something I enjoyed greatly. 

Jenny: Terrific. And what was your very first involvement with URMIA? Do you remember?

Mike: Oh boy, my first conference was in Denver in, I believe, 1998. I think I was on a committee or two but that’s going back farther than my memory serves at this point. My true involvement got started when I joined the executive committee. 

Jenny: Terrific. Well, it’s great to have you with us today, and next up I have the legendary Gary Langsdale, who is now currently URMIAs education manager, but recently retired from the Pennsylvania State University. So, Gary, welcome, and the same questions to you. Give us a little bit of background about your risk management experience, and then your URMIA experience. 

Gary: Well, thank you Jenny. My involvement in risk management began in 1976 when I started working for an insurance company, and my higher ed experience actually began before that for one year after I graduated from college and before I got in the insurance industry, I was the assistant director of residence life for allegating college. Little did I know at that point that that was going to lead to a later career in higher ed. I spent 25 years in risk management In the forest products industry, and then came to work for Penn State in 2003 and retired at the end of this past year. My involvement in URMIA did not begin in 1976, but when I got to Penn State, one of the first things that my coworkers told me was that there was this organization called URMIA that you need to check out, and so I think it was not more than a couple of weeks after I started to work at Penn State that I joined URMIA. It was after the 2003 conference had taken place, so my first real conference involvement was 2004 at the conference in Anchorage. What I remember about that conference was that the leadership o0f URMIA was meeting at that time to decide to hire a full time association manager, Jenny, and the conference was great, it was eye-opening for me because of, I thought I had seen one of everything in Risk Management in my prior career until I got to Penn State, whereas I tell everybody the nuclear reactor shares a driveway with the childcare center, and so there were many many issues that I learned about in higher ed risk management that I had never previously encountered. It’s been a wonderful experience ever since. 

Jenny: Terrific. Well it is so wonderful to have you both with us today on URMIAmatters, and both of your URMIA days are prior to my days, but I attribute my early years in URMIA, and you guys both being significant leaders of the organization, so thanks for all that you’ve done for the organization, that you continue to do for the organization. But today we are here to talk about a recent white paper that the URMIA international committee published. We actually published this for the first time at the Boston conference. So this document is called the international travel guidelines. It was published first in September, and I believe we made a couple edits to it after the conference. So, Mike, you were kind of the leader of this initiative, and then Gary was on the international committee, and I serve as the staff person for the international committee. So, Mike, why don’t you talk about why the committee wanted to publish this paper to begin with. 

Mike: I think that the committee felt like there was an awful lot of information that was available from the talent within the international committee that’d never really been gathered together In a any kind of formal document that could be shared with the membership, and I came in to the committee as a liaison from the executive committee and the board of directors, and then just sort of hang around afterwards, if you will. There appeared to be a need for somebody just to step up and take ownership of developing that into an actual product. I had a little bit of experience doing that with a prior contract guidelines document that we put out several years back, so  I felt pretty comfortable with that. So, one thing lead to another, and kind of took off with it. 

Jenny: Gosh, Mike I’m really glad you brought up that third-party contracts white paper, and we’ll definitely put that in the show notes, and that continues to be one of the most downloaded resources URMIA has, and it might be about time for us to update that, so we might be reaching out to you after this podcast to get that project going again, and so we will definitely be able to put that in the show notes, and I appreciate all of your efforts on that white paper, that has been a labor of love for years, We try to update that paper every few years, so thanks for bringing that up. So, Gary, why don’t I turn it to you now, I mean as part of the international committee for years, what’s your recollection of why the committee wanted to publish this paper?

Gary: well… As Mike said, there’s a lot of knowledge out there, but it hadn’t been gathered in a focused way previously. There have been white papers that have been presentations about a lot of different aspects of international level, but it  wasn’t crystallized in one place. I want to talk about Mike’s involvement, he did a great job. Don’t let Mike’s easy-going manner fool you  about his work on this. He was a great larder putting this together and sometimes begging people to contribute and at other times editing what they had written, and it turned out to be a really good document. On thing that I want to say about this paper is that this was designed, and it’s been successful in this way, to just give you a hint what the issues are, that are out there. I’ve said that the purpose of the paper is to be a mouth wide and a foot deep about all the potential issues of international travel. It’s just to remind the members, both new members who are new to risk management or are new to higher ed, or the most experienced higher ed risk managers of a checklist of what are the issues that you need to face so you’re not missing anything. Each item in this white paper is only a paragraph long, but it covers a lot of ground so that the risk manager can think about have I thought about this today, when there are challenges more than ever with a potential virus that has significant ramifications for international travel in at least some parts of the world to go back and look at have I thought of everything, not only for travel to, say, China, but also other parts of the world where Coronavirus hasn’t hit but there are still other challenges in other parts of the world that we can’t forget about. 

Jenny: Thanks Gary. And let me back up just a tiny bit and give a little bit of definition to the international committee, so the international committee’s been around for over a decade I’d speculate, but I don’t remember exactly when it started, but we did kick that off with the international fellowship program and this was a long time ago and that program actually Mike Gansor was one of the recipients of the international fellowship program where he had the opportunity to go to London and meet with risk managers abroad and that was a great program that we offered a long time ago but the international committee over the years has really curated a lot of the international content that goes into our conferences. They either put together the sessions themselves or they help advise on the sessions and they definitely help moderate the sessions. And I know both Gary and Mike have done that over the years and Mike, before we turn to the actual content in the paper, to just kind of wet people’s appetites for why they should go to the library and find this great resource and download it. I believe that you were fairly new to this area when you started researching the paper. Are you much involved in the international programs at West Virginia? Can you talk about that a little bit? 

Mike: I am from a side, if you will. We do have an international risk manager who pretty much deals with the day to day travels of our student population and the University’s expanded and made a requirement that all international travel goes through their office. It used to be just the students, but now we require faculty and staff to register there too so that they have the benefit of taking advantage of the emergency systems program that we have, that type of thing, so I’ve helped set up, select that vendor and I’ve also helped select the medical insurance provider that is coupled with that, and I do see what’s going on. I keep close ear to the ground, but that’s a whole field in itself, thankfully we have somebody who is dedicated to that and it’s not my primary responsibility.

Jenny: How long have you had that position? Is that a newer position at your institution? 

Mike: The actual title, probably, but the individual sitting in the chair has probably been there 10-15 years. I don’t actually know. She’s been there quite some time. She knows many of our people on the international committee, which is comprised of some other international risk managers, and she knows some of them quite well. 

Jenny: Yeah, I do know that was one of the sessions we offered in Boston. It was about how to go about getting that kind of position on your campus, so we will also put that in the show notes as well about that session. We have actually done that session twice over the years at the annual conference, so this was the second iteration of that. But, Mike, let’s focus now on the actual content of the paper. Can you just kind of walk us through the structure of it and how folks might use it? 

Mike: Sure. I mean the index is pretty detailed, it will help lead you to a particular area if you have a particular topic or matter that you want to learn a little about, the index can get you pretty close in the document. It’s broken down into I think maybe three broad categories, one being the equivalent of the property liability auto insurance challenges we all face domestically when you go abroad, whether you’re traveling there temporarily or you’re setting up a campus, something like that, and all the unique things that you need to consider that might be different country by country. Then the other component is the medical aspect, the medical insurance, health insurance, if you will. If you happen to be across the ocean and run into some medical needs that you need to address, and then kind of married to that is the emergency assistance program that so many of us have through a number of different vendors. Often times the emergency assistance is tied closely to the health medical insurance program. I know that’s the way we have it here at the University, but whether you use your own domestically and it goes with you and you just have the emergency assistance or whether you have all of them together. That’s kind of one of the things it touches on, there’s just a variety of different ways to look at things. 

Jenny: Great. How about you, Gary? Are there any parts of the document that you want to highlight to our audience today?

Gary: Well, I would rather highlight the fact that it is such a broad reference document. Even if you do nothing more than glance at the headings, the titles of the different sections, you’re going to get something out of it just by reading through the index. It’s going to put you in mind of  some things you need to keep focused on. There are many ways to deal with emergency assistance providers and deal with health insurance, as Mike pointed out, but the point is you need to focus on each of these to make sure that your travelers are ready, and there are many emerging trends in the field that focus recently over the last couple of years on mental health for travelers oversees and there’s a section that deals with that points out some things to do with that. The most common issue, my recollection is from speaking with my colleagues from global programs both my university and elsewhere in the industry, is common medical issues, but you need to have a good program for dealing with it so that the individual travelers and particularly the group leaders, if there is a faculty for example who is taking a bunch of students, knows what to do if somebody has the flu or exhibits other symptoms for hospitalization. This white paper talks about that, but it’s really just a call to action on behalf of the risk manager to work with whatever the group Is called that is more directly involved with international travel, whether it’s the global program office or international education department, or whatever the case may be, the primary thing that risk managers need to do in conjunction with this white paper is even perhaps share it with that international group, the global programs office, to make sure they can have a good conversation about how are we going to deal with this if something happens.

Jenny: That is a great segue to pretty much my last question about the document, or last statement in request to everybody out there listening, is that we really wanted this resource to be kind of a living, breathing resource in the library, and we’re looking for extra ideas to include in the paper, so if anybody listening has any of those please send them to the URMIA office, urmia@urmia.org or jenny@urmia.org and I will share those with the international committee, and we will kind of vet those and figure out how and where to put them in the document, but we want this to be a useful resource for the members, so we’re definitely looking for feedback and Mike, do you have any specific requests or anything that we’re looking for? 

Mike: Well I’m glad that you brought that up because if you didn’t, I was going to. If you were to actually look at the document in its entirety, you would find that it might seem somewhat fragmented in some places or maybe some areas where it’s thinner than others and could stand some additional volume, and that’s where we, I reached out at our conference presentation in Boston, and I’ll do so again here with this opportunity is to make the people who are part of URMIA aware that we are wanting to be a sponge for information and so if you know something, if you’re a broker representative, affiliate member, or an international risk manager, or anywhere in between, and you have information after looking at the document that you think should be in there, and you can present it to the committee, we have a great resource who has helped us with the editing of the document and responds very quickly, so if you get an idea that needs to be shared, we’ll figure out where it needs to go, and probably within a couple of weeks it will be in the document and it will be available online. Since we’re not printing it all the time, it’s very easy to do that, and it makes It, as you say, a living, breathing document. That’s one difference our third party contractor guidelines, we have to update them every so often to keep pace with the industry, but with this particular form, we’re trying to keep it going month by month, if you will. 

Jenny: Yeah, we definitely want it to be fluid. How about you, Gary? Any closing comments about this resource? 

Gary: I think my advice would be: read it. Take a look at it. It is always good, with so many things going on in risk management every day, it’s hard to keep track of some of the fundamental basics, and this is a great document just to remind risk managers and others at the university that there are all these issues, and anyone of them can come up at any moment when you least expect it. 

Jenny: Well, thanks so much to you both for being my guests today on URMIAmatters and I think that’ll be a wrap. Thank you!