8 Ways to Apply Risk Management to Your Adventure Business

8 Ways to Apply Risk Management to Your Adventure Business

Risk Management Plans can be overwhelming. Recently, we have noticed that many adventure businesses don’t have a formal Risk Management Plan put together and more often than not don’t even know where to begin. THAT’S OK! This is a huge project and one that warrants the time to focus, which can be hard to come by as a small business owner.

This type of project is a BIG one on many levels and can feel quite daunting. In this post, you will hear us talking more about Risk Management planning and absolute musts you should have in place. We think this would be a great fall project for a lot of our summer businesses.

What is a Risk Management Plan?

A risk management plan is a rational approach to help deal with risk and is used by businesses in all industries. It is the process of determining acceptable exposure levels, identifying hazards and evaluating those hazards, and explaining how the different elements of risk are being managed. The planning is done through the development of processes and policy documents that cover four main categories;

  1. Business structure and insurance
  2. Trip planning and emergency response planning
  3. Staff selection and training
  4. Client materials (marketing & pre-trip preparations)

What is the objective and goal of a Risk Management Plan?

The risk management plan’s goal is to provide a centralized place for all the backend logic, decisions, and order of processes to be kept. You can then take out sections and expand on them to create things like the hiring processes or as a local tour operator screening process to develop new trips.  

You will use bits and pieces of the risk management plan in different parts of your business, but it does make it easier to have it in one cohesive, centralized place.

Why is it so important to have a Risk Management Plan in the adventure industry?

Adventure businesses have an added risk that is inherent with outdoors and travel – people can be seriously injured when something goes wrong and quality health care isn’t always available close by. Having basic processes in place like screening clients into trips, clients being informed about risks via a waiver process, requiring the minimum certifications from guides, and maintaining current evacuation plans are all basic risks management standards.

What to do before you create a Risk Management plan?

1. Define your businesses tolerance to risk

Your business needs to acknowledge the fact that with outdoor activities there is an increased risk due to the outdoor factor. We know that the benefits of outdoor activities outweigh a certain level of risk. The challenge is determining this level and doing everything in our control to ensure programs operate within this tolerance. For every activity and program you undertake, you must consider if it can be reasonably anticipated that the outcome of the activity will be favourable and that clients will be neither physically nor mentally harmed.

2. Risk Identification

You have to take a look at where possible risks may occur within your adventure business and break it down into different categories – operational risk, legal risk, public relations/reputational risk and financial risk. Risk cannot be avoided, but it can be reduced and managed. We can manage risk using 3 simple steps.

  1. Identify the potential hazards
  2. Evaluate the consequences
  3. Take action – make a decision to control your interaction with the hazard

On top of this basic framework, you have to then factor in the environmental conditions (now and future conditions), your supplies and resources, the time of day, and the distance and time to get medical help should something go awry. These factors affect the consequence and any one of these can be any easy ‘no’ to engaging with a hazard. Managing risk means reducing the likelihood of an accident.

3. Understand what you CAN control and what you can’t

Risk management isn’t just emergency response plans and on-trip physical hazards, it’s bigger than that. It’s thinking about things like;

  • How can the business AVOID exposure to risk?
  • Can we REDUCE frequency of loss or the severity?
  • How can we TRANSFER risks (via insurance/subcontracting/incorporating/waivers)?
  • If we have to ABSORB risk, how do you handle that?

8 Ways to Apply Risk Management Now…

1. Ensure guests are adequately informed and warned about inherent risks and prove it.

Goals: Avoid/ Reduce
There are many ways to tackle this one, so let’s keep it super simple.

  • Sprinkle adequate information throughout the entire marketing process as well as the trip preparation.
  • Ensure clients receive all information about the trip in writing via email.
  • Provide visuals or host a webinar to help support ambiguous concepts like level of difficulty.
  • Ensure guides have an orientation script to review the activities on the very first day.
  • You can use tasks, in software like YouLi, to ensure clients get a chance to review important elements like ‘hazards on our adventures’ or ‘what to pack’ which help ensure they show up prepared. Clients have to manually ‘check off’ that they have completed the tasks, meaning you have PROOF that they did it.

2. Use a trip approval process to screen clients IN to your adventures.

Goals: Avoid/ Reduce
All of your participants should be required to submit registration forms. You should aim to tailor registration forms PER TRIP TYPE because you should be more specific about questions around heart/lung conditions when trekking to high elevations than on a Baja snorkelling trip. Registration forms can be created directly in software (YouLi) or using a dedicated form builder (Google Forms, Type Form etc.). Stay away from paper forms since this is an additional obstacle for people (print, fill out, scan, return, and you hope you can read their writing!)

In these forms, be sure to include questions like;

  • Basic Info: Name (as on passport), address, phone, email, birthday, height and weight etc.
  • Info to make travel plans on their behalf – Passport and Visa information.
  • Description of clients outdoor and travel experience
    • Ask them to describe expereinces for you like “tell me about your last hike over 15 kms?”
    • Ask skill specific questions like “are you able to ride at a trot for 1-2 hours? can you roll a kayak?”
    • Ask questions that indicate thier level of commitment to the sport “do you own a horse/ kayak/ skis?”
    • How often they participate in the sport and set the criteria “once a week”, “once a month” etc.
    • Do they work out regularily and what kinds of workouts they enjoy.
    • Ask them to share a travel expereince that went wrong or they participated in something and were UNPREPARED and how they handled it?
  • Medical & Allergy information
    • Here, you can go as detailed as you want. I have seen busineses list medical issues individually and travellers have to select Y/N for each as well as simple questions like ‘please share any relevent medical details with us’.
    • For allergies, ask about severity and if they travel with an epipen.
  • Group details/preferences
    • Are they travelling with anyone?
    • Do they have a bed type/room preference? Are they sharing with anyone?
    • Dietary – registration forms are a great place to ask about this AND review expectations. Use a multi-select function to set the options for main diet and then add a second question to allow for ‘preference’. Language like “Although we will do our best to accommodate your dietary requests, please note that we may not be able to accommodate all requests due to the destination and availability of certain foods.
  • Get the waiver signed if not already completed.

3. Avoid promising safety

Goals: Avoid
Never guarantee or promise safety. You can talk about a clean safety record, the level of staff training or how you stay current but do not make claims that promise to keep people safe. Instead, have open conversations about natural hazards or inherent risks like weather, terrain and group dynamics. These hazards are reasons why people should train for your adventure, learn about the local weather or otherwise self-prepare.

4. All guides MUST have wilderness first aid and activity specific certifications

Goals: Avoid/Reduce
Accidents still happen and when they do, you want a confident guide attending to the scene. A highly trained wilderness first aider is key to reducing the severity of an injury because they can manage it in the field and make the best decision at the time to get your client off the trip.

Trained guides and guides with lots of experience are you’re biggest assets. They can help the business avoid risk with strong decision-making and leadership skills. Adding certifications to their experience only buffers both the business and the guide from litigation because the certifying body can support you both when guides act within their training.

5. Each trip must have a written emergency/evacuation plan that is regularly reviewed

Goals: Reduce
These evacuation guidelines help reduce the severity of an incident for everyone. An emergency or evacuation plan is intended to provide guidelines to trained guides and trip leaders to follow in the event of an emergency. No two situations are the same, so we have to leave some room for situational judgement calls. We do want to ensure they know things like who to call, where to go to get service, how to get out, who is on standby to help them, and the in-field tools (first aid kits, radios etc.) and to be able to manage the situation until help arrives.

6. Use a properly drafted liability-release form

Goals: Avoid/Reduce/Transfer
A good waiver can deter a client from beginning a lawsuit (do they actually want to spend the time and money to find out if the waiver will be upheld?) as well as ensures the business that your insurance will payout. In Canada, our insurance companies require us to have clients sign a waiver before every event and the insurance company reviews the waiver annually to ensure it meets their standards. We can use electronic waiver software (like Smartwaiver) to capture signatures and email clients a copy of the signed waiver.

…..use organizations to help you

Some organizations (like Paddle Canada), require their insured members to get waivers signed BEFORE payment is made by the client. This is fairly logical since before a client pays, they feel less obligated to sign the waiver. You and your sales team should be available to answer any questions clients have about the waiver, so here, staff training is key. You can use live chat on your T&C page to pop in and say “Did you have any questions about our booking policies or waiver of liability? We are happy to help you understand all of this before you sign up “

Delivering the waiver is key. Below are the places where you’re waiver should be presented and when you can ask for signatures;

  • In T&C (front and centre with a call to action to review and ideally sign before they pay)
  • The booking page * best if signed prior to payment
  • On the invoice
  • On the payment page
  • Clearly visible on the receipt
  • Task due upon payment (0 days after) (to actually sign the waiver if they haven’t already done so)
  • Signed copy emailed to client
  • Signed copy stored with a back up copy (redundancy is the best insurance policy!)

7. Maintain Commercial Liability Insurance and ensure clients secure travel insurance

Goals: Reduce/Transfer
This is a key business strategy to transfer the bulk of the financial risk of your adventure travel business.

  1. Incorporated (transfers legal liability off your person/family)
  2. The corporation maintains commercial liability insurance (to transfer the costs of litigation/busines interupption/loss of revenue etc. over to the insurance provider) and even employee insurance (like Workers Compensation if a guide get’s hurt at work).
  3. You require travellers to have travel insurance to join your trip. All travellers (at minimum) should have medical, evacuation, and repatriation coverage basically it needs to cover personal injury and emergency medical expenses. You don’t want to have a bad accident and have to cover your clients medical bills!
  4. Encourage travllers to extend their coverage to include cancellation, curtailment, and all other expenses that may arise as a result of loss, damage, injury, delay or inconvenience while traveling.

8. Establish clear customer complaint processes within your Terms and Conditions

Goals: Reduce/Absorb
Have a re-read of your Booking Terms – is there a section about how clients should file a complaint? Section 16 & 17 of G Adventures Terms & Conditions is a leading example of setting the terms and what clients can expect if something does not go as planned.

I encourage you to review other adventure businesses’ terms and conditions to see how others handle various situations, present information, and set expectations with clients. Then update your own T&C with terms that fit your risk tolerance and business practices. It is this T&C page this is your block to stand on when something doesn’t go according to plan and clients are unhappy.

On the backend, you still need to think about how you might absorb the financial implications of a very unhappy client. What if they didn’t get trip cancellation and then their house burned down? (True story!) How would you handle this as an empathetic human despite your business’s policies?

Collaborations

Recently we collaborated with YouLi to discuss Adventure Industry Risk Management Standards and the best practices to have in place to provide a duty of care for travelling customers. We did a high-level overview of what information, advice, procedures you should provide, and how. We recommend grabbing a coffee and watching both. Katie also did a live session going in-depth about the 8 ways to apply Risk Management to your adventure business so take a watch below!

To Conclude

Creating a Risk Management Plan can seem overwhelming to say the least but it has to be done to protect you and your visitors.

You don’t have to do it alone. We can come in and do a full Audit and see what Risk Management plans you have in place and what can we improve on. Recognizing that not every business is the same. We make sure we tailor-make it to suit you and YOUR business’s needs.

Let’s work together and discuss what gaps may exist in your Risk Management practices.

Join the Conversation

We would love for you to join our Business of Adventure Facebook group. This is a collaborative space for business owners or freelancers in the adventure travel and tourism space. The focus here is to share best practices and tips about online presence and digital marketing (front end) and online systems (backend) so you can establish a rock-solid foundation for your adventure business. If this is something you could benefit from, please join!