Companies hunker down with travel bans to combat coronavirus

Companies are cancelling business travel and and making contingency plans for employees to work remotely.

People across Europe and the US are taking precautions to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Picture: Getty Images

As fears rise in the US over the rapid spread of the coronavirus COVID-19, companies are cancelling business travel and corporate off-site events around the world and making contingency plans for more employees to work remotely.

Nestle told more than 290,000 employees to suspend all international business travel until March 15, and requested that all domestic trips be skipped whenever possible for now.

“We take our responsibility for our employees and to the communities in which we operate seriously,” a spokeswoman for the Swiss maker of Nescafe coffee and Purina pet food said.

Nestle’s announcement is among the first by a major multinational to restrict all its employees from flying anywhere. Other companies trying to navigate the epidemic are adding new travel ­restrictions. Goldman Sachs banned all business travel to South Korea and certain parts of Italy, after previously putting travel to China off limits. The bank is also asking employees to postpone non-essential travel to Italy and all of Asia. Siemens has told employees not to travel to Italy, a spokeswoman said.

A spokesman for Campari said the Milan-area spirits company had asked employees to limit trips to and from Italy.

Event planners already see a chill beyond China. Nearly three-quarters of large business event-planning companies responding to a mid-February survey by trade publication MeetingsNet said that clients had cancelled or postponed events in the Asia-Pacific region beyond China. Another 14 per cent and 10 per cent had seen the same in the US/Canada and in Europe, respectively.

In the US, for example, Xerox postponed its Global Partner Summit, which had been scheduled to convene in Orlando, Florida, next month. “Our first priority is the health and safety of our employees and partners around the globe,” the company said. Earlier this month, Facebook cancelled its annual marketing conference slated to take place in San Francisco in March.

At Boston-based global payments platform Flywire, many employees have held off on booking travel, including chief executive Mike Massaro. He generally goes on eight international trips a year but now says he’ll do half that in 2020.

“I have a wife who for the first time has asked me, hey, do I have any international trips planned? Where are they? Have I thought about moving them?” he said.

A few weeks ago, he ventured to Paris for a conference but avoided the big presentations packed with hundreds of people, preferring small group events.

While companies are taking precautionary measures, Tammy Krings, chief executive of ATG Travel Worldwide, said the novel coronavirus hadn’t hit certain countries such as Germany, the UK and the US hard enough to permanently impact company travel procedures. She called those three countries bellwethers for a possible pandemic.

“We thought when SARS happened it would have some sort of long-term sustainable change, but it really didn’t,” Ms Krings said.

“As soon as things cleared up, as long as the Germans and Brits were on planes, everyone else was as well.”

Nestle is also encouraging ­employees to work from home where possible. Its announcement comes after US federal health authorities said they expected a wider spread of the coronavirus in the US and were preparing for a potential pandemic, calling on businesses, schools and communities to plan for a potential outbreak. If the virus spreads more widely, experts say efforts would shift to strategies such as closing schools, cancelling mass gatherings and requiring employees to work from home.

The word “zoom” is part of many companies’ contingency planning. Shares in Zoom Video Communications, a remote conferencing software provider, have jumped more than 40 per cent this month. Similar companies are reporting rising usage of their services as well. Cisco Systems said its Webex enterprise collaboration software was seeing four to five times as many users in Japan, South Korea and Singapore than usual, with traffic on some of its routes involving China-based users also going up by as much as 22 times.

“Our thoughts are with all those impacted,” said Sri Srinivasan, senior vice-president at Cisco.

The company is currently offering free use of its tool in affected countries.

Many businesses are trying to prepare for the likelihood of the virus cropping up suddenly in their backyards. Matt Britton, CEO of market research software provider Suzy, said his company was contemplating emergency arrangements for its 65 employees, most of whom are in New York.

Additional reporting: Rachel Feintzeig