On any trip abroad, even to countries thought to be safe, it is important to consider the cultural and social differences. Conflicts or adverse situations might be more difficult to handle away from home, especially if the language is unfamiliar. Some habits and customs that are common in one’s home country might be disrespectful or even criminal in some places. This course highlights risks and advice on how to act in many different situations.
This course covers the topic of cybercrime, which comprises any criminal act involving computers and networks, as well as traditional crimes conducted through the internet. The prevalence and cost of cybercrime, including identity theft, hacking of bank accounts, and loss of intellectual property, has ramped up significantly over the last decade. This course provides key insights on how to identify different types of cybercrime attempts in order to avoid them to the greatest extent possible.
A traveler may be exposed to a variety of health risks in unfamiliar environments. Most risks can be minimized by taking precautions before, during, and after a trip. We list such precautions in this e-learning course.
Navigating crowded spaces is common when visiting large cities. Travelers will often arrive at busy stations and airports. They sometimes may have to pass close to high-risk events, such as political rallies. Large crowds may cause disruption to public transport, making it difficult to navigate the city. This course teaches preventative measures that will help reduce those risks.
Women may face additional security risks while abroad. This course, which is intended for both men and women, explores the various risks women travelers can face in order to help avoid dangers and better enable providing assistance to others.
Members of the LGBTQ community may face unique issues when traveling that are dangerous to neglect. In some parts of the world, acceptance for people identifying as LGBTQ may not be what travelers are used to in their home countries, such as discrimination or targeted violence. This course highlights such potential risks of LGBTQ travelers and lists what to read up on before traveling, such as the legal environment, potential cultural biases in that country, etc.
Terrorism has been a serious threat for a long time. Terrorist attacks are often directed against civilians and tourists to generate the greatest amount of publicity. This course teaches travelers what to look for in terms of potential vulnerability in their surroundings.
Carjacking is a form of robbery where a criminal forcibly removes a motorist from their car and steals it. Perpetrators of carjacking often wield firearms. In some parts of the world, this form of crime is a pervasive problem, while it is largely unheard of in other countries. This course explores what to know about carjacking and steps to protect against it while traveling.
This course provides information about what to expect before traveling to higher and extreme risk locations, such as war zones or former war zones, often called hostile environments. A hostile environment could be defined as an area that is extremely volatile, with widespread conflict, localized insurgencies, criminal gangs, or ongoing violent civil unrest that are affecting businesses, visitors, and the local population.
On the Home Page of the Safeture Mobile Application, you’ll find a summary of the latest alerts relevant to you, based on your location, and a list of your upcoming travel bookings. At the top bar, you have quick access to your privacy settings and a Check-In button for manual location reports.
The Home Page of the Safeture Mobile Application has a feed with the latest alerts relevant to you. Your privacy settings will influence what alerts are shown since they are filtered based on your location. The more exact location you allow, the more relevant the alerts you will receive. If you select additional countries of interest in the settings, you will also see those alerts in the feed on the Home Page.
When you receive a medium- or high-risk alert, you can confirm that you are OK by pressing the I’m OK button inside the alert. The Safeture Platform then informs the Administrator about your well-being. This input will help the potential Assistance Providers or your own Administrator(s) to follow up only with those who have not confirmed they are OK or have clicked the Emergency button.
Read more about the risk assessment methodology.
More information on the alert publishing process.
Since alerts are distributed based on your last known location, your privacy settings will directly impact what alerts you will receive. With a region or state level set, you will get all alerts within that region or state. You can also select a country of interest to get alerts from even though you are not currently located there.
We highly value end-user privacy and therefore give end-users the option to set their own privacy level by themselves in the Safeture Mobile Application. There, you can choose between the following privacy levels:
The exact GPS coordinates will be used to represent the end-user’s location.
City-level means that the end user’s location will be anonymized to a 20 x 20 km square, giving a bit more privacy, but while still being able to receive relevant alerts based on a fairly accurate location.
Region/State means that the app will resolve which region or state the user is located within and send use this as the end-user’s location.
The Check-In button is located at the top of the Home Page and is used to send up-to-date location reports to the Safeture Platform with respect to your privacy settings. Normally, the app sends location reports at intervals, so in most cases, the button provides a way to make sure an up-to-date location is sent.
If Scheduled Check-Ins are added as an additional service, Administrators can set certain dates and times when end-users will get notified to check in as a safety measure. If a check-in deadline is missed by one or several users, the system will trigger notifications to alert the Administrator.
In the middle of the bottom bar inside the Safeture Mobile Application is the Emergency button. When you tap it, you are directed to the Emergency section containing several different emergency numbers. At the top, you will find one or more SOS buttons (depending on the account setup). Tap on it to enable emergency mode. The Safeture Platform will inform both the Safeture Administrators and your security/medical providers simultaneously (if integrated into the platform) about the emergency. While in emergency mode, Safeture automatically informs your security provider of your current location for prompt assistance.
Note: You can share your location and initiate emergency mode via SMS even if your mobile device cannot access the internet when you are experiencing an emergency.
In the emergency section, you will also have access to all local emergency numbers, which are automatically updated based on the country where you are located. Finally, the emergency section also contains a link to a map view plotted with all nearby healthcare providers.
At the top of the Emergency section of the Safeture Mobile Application, you will find two tabs. Navigating to the Location tab will enable you to quickly share your location.
Click on the globe icon in the bottom menu to find country-specific information for the country you are in or a manually chosen location. The country information in the app is identical to the Country Information module in the Safeture Web Portal.
The Medical tab contains a list of medications and conditions identical to the one in the Web Portal.
Safeture’s E-Learning program offers advanced training for employees. It contains a variety of courses that provide insights for safer travel. These include courses on Travel Health Risks, Crowd Safety, Women Travelers, High-Risk Locations, and many more.
Read more about our E-Learning program on Safeture’s website.
In the Providers tab of the Safeture Mobile Application, you will find a map view for both Medical and Accommodation Providers to help you locate the nearest hospital or safe hotel. In the filtering menu, you can choose to only show Safeture-preferred medical providers. Note that medical providers might only be displayed depending on your account setup.
On the Home Page, you will also find a list of all your upcoming travel bookings. Click on one of them to find detailed travel information for that trip. You will get push notifications for flight disruptions or gate changes and pre-travel advisories.
Incidents are first detected through proprietary data gathering tools, scanning thousands of information sources. The system also has a built-in auto-translation capacity to manage sources in a variety of languages.
These are a few of the types of data sources used to gather information on incidents:
After data gathering, the information first goes through automatic filtering by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system (semantic relationships) plus a list of keywords to search for. A secondary manual filtering is done by Safeture’s team of analysts, consisting of 20 analysts, based in Brazil, Sweden, and Malaysia working 24/7/365 days per year covering all time zones globally. They then verify the data, define the impact radius, severity, and finally, publish the alert. We maintain absolute control and ownership of all the content provided and have the last say on any evaluation or assessment put forward to clients and partners.
The impact radius is dynamic and varies depending on the incident. For instance, a shooting is seen as a very local incident while an earthquake might have countrywide effect. The radius of the incident is set based on the incident category and how widespread the effect is. They are set with an interval between 10 km and 1000 km. Event radius crosses borders and may be set as nationwide. Minor incidents, such as traffic disruptions, civil unrest, and events, start within a 10 km radius. Natural disasters span a large radius interval, with the most widespread tropical storms ranging upwards 1000 km.
If the incident is seen as critical, an initial message will be published and sent to clients in the affected location within 5-15 minutes from when a source initially reported about the incident. We are capable to do so due to the integrated information mining system, message publication system, and our highly automated process. Sometimes robot publication is used where the time between source input to message (SMS, push notification) publication and send-out is required to be short and where the source is highly credible, such as automated tsunami warnings.
On publication of an alert, the Safeture Platform will automatically send out an alert about the incident to all end-users that are within the impact radius. By “Favoriting” a region, end-users will receive newly published alerts for that country even if they are not traveling to, or within, that country. The alert will show as a notification, and when pressing the link or notification, the end-user is presented with an alert overview. A map will show the incident location, the risk level, and the distance from their current position to the incident location.
The Safeture Platform will also notify relevant Administrators in the Safeture Web Portal (own/service providers) if any employees were impacted by the alert. To Administrators, alert notifications are sent via email and can be configured to send via SMS also.
The Safeture Platform uses a variety of methods and functionality to locate employees. The locations of your employees are continuously uploaded to Safeture servers, all in compliance with GDPR.
Below you find all these methods listed and explained:
The Mobile Application Positioning is used for active monitoring. If activated, the Safeture Mobile Application automatically sends location data without any manual input by the end-user. The location is based on GPS, WIFI network, VPN, and Mobile Network connections.
Being connected to WIFI increases the likelihood that your position reporting will be inaccurate compared to your “true” location. In practice, the position of your internet base station or router, i.e., probably set by your internet provider, will be used as your actual position.
Similar to WIFI, being connected to VPN significantly increases the likelihood that your position reporting will be inaccurate compared to your “true” location. Depending on the VPN setup, it may report your position in a different state or country for privacy purposes. Using VPN can make your device believe that you are at a different location than your real location and thereby report a “false” location on the Safeture App.
This is the best option for getting an accurate position. In this case, with a strong cellular network connection, your position can be determined by triangulation and GPS (trilateration), theoretically depicted in the graphic. Hence, being in a basement usually decreases the accuracy, while being outdoors increases position accuracy significantly. Also, turning on Bluetooth improves location accuracy as Apple location service utilizes it in reporting positions.
The platform will use the itinerary location of a trip as that person’s location, which requires integration with a Travel Management Company, parsing through email, or manual input of travel data.
The end-user can also manually check-in by pressing the check-in button in the app, which will send that person’s location to the Safeture Platform.
Travel booking information is a key component of the Safeture offering. We integrate with all Travel Management Companies (TMCs) and Global Distribution Systems (GDSs), so Safeture can automatically import all travel booking data. During the onboarding process, Safeture will contact your travel providers and arrange for the connection between the travel providers and Safeture. Safeture has connections to all GDS providers and TMCs.
An agreement between you and the TMC that allows the TMC to send copies of the Passenger Name Records (PNRs) to Safeture needs to be set up beforehand. When the agreement and identifiers are in place, the TMC can send copies of the PNRs to Safeture via the GDS.
For bookings that are not connected to GDS, we can provide an SFTP that the TMC can upload bookings to.
When the TMC makes a booking for the client, a copy should be sent to the Safeture queue in the GDS. Safeture regularly monitors the queue for new PNRs. PNRs will be parsed by Safeture, and, when detected, will be determined if they’re completely new bookings or contain updates and cancellations.
Traveler identification is done via phone number, email, frequent flyer ID, and name. If a trip contains several bookings, it will be pieced together for the end-user and displayed accordingly. We support PNRs that have more than one traveler.
The PNR queue on Amadeus and Sabre is scanned every 15 minutes. The TMC needs to re-queue the PNR for the update to be visible. Each PNR is updated at a regular interval before each departure segment. For TravelPort, updates are done when new updates are received.
For bookings made outside of default TMCs, users can use email parsing, where travel booking confirmations are emailed to a defined email address. A third option is to manually add a travel booking in the Travel module within the Web Portal.
All alerts published in the Safeture Platform are assigned both a risk level and one, or several, risk categories by the Safeture analysts. The country-specific risk assessments are categorized into the same ten risk categories but have five different risk levels. Below you find in-depth information on the risk assessment methodology.
Airstrike: attack conducted by an aircraft (including UAV).
Armed Conflict: armed clashes between two or more state actors or aspiring state actors involving conventional warfare tactics.
Civil Unrest: violent gatherings (be it riots or violence on behalf of protesters, or forcible dispersal by security forces).
Crime: opportunistic and/or smaller scale than organized crime.
Cyber-attack: conducted via cyberspace.
Developing: any incident with potential immediate effect with yet unclear circumstances, which requires immediate notification to clients before all details are clear (for example- an explosion may be a suicide bombing or a gas cylinder accident, but nonetheless needs to be reported immediately so that mitigating actions can be taken).
Earthquake: shift in tectonic plates, Earthquakes can range in size from very weak to catastrophic.
Fire: a large and destructive inflammation event that may threaten human life, health, and/or property.
Health: medical threat to peoples’ wellbeing or interference of medical installations.
Holiday: celebration/occasion that results in travel/operational disruptions.
Labor Action: strikes of different levels, from local disruptions to complete shutdowns.
Militancy: armed clashes involving at least one side that employs unconventional warfare tactics.
Organized Crime – racketeering, extortion, blackmail, trafficking and any large-scale organized criminal activities.
Piracy – criminal attack targeting naval vessel.
Politics – changes in policies/strategic developments which may impact travel/operations.
Protest – gathering of a number of people to demonstrate their shared public ideas.
Rocket/Mortar – usage of standoff weapons in a capacity other than airstrikes.
Service Failure – water/electricity/communications outages, etc.
Travel – any incident that would impact travel and does not fall in line with the other categories (for example: road work).
Volcano – eruption of hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases.
Weather – unusual weather conditions that may pose risk to human life, property and business continuity.
Information that may be good to know, such as public transport disturbances, minor demonstrations or updates of previous security warnings.
Incidents or threats that may occur in the coming days or recently have occurred.
Immediate and serious threats to your safety and/or health.
The likelihood and potential consequences of a threat are so low that no or only very basic mitigation measures are necessary.
The likelihood and/or potential consequences of a threat are such that robust mitigation measures are recommended. Professional support might be required in some areas.
Both the likelihood and potential consequences of being affected by a threat are so severe that most mitigation measures are either unavailable or ineffectual. Professional support is required.
The likelihood and/or potential consequences of a threat are at such a high level that professional support is likely required in order to mitigate the risk.
Safeture (founded in 2009) is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company based in Sweden.
The company offers a complete platform designed to manage employee safety and risk/crisis management.
Through world-leading technology and innovative solutions, Safeture helps almost 4 000 companies and organizations to protect what matters most – their employees.