Jamie Biesiada
The State Department's website, travel.state.gov, is one frequently used by travel advisors and their clients as a resource, especially when the travelers' destination might be experiencing some kind of unease.
It's also the site that industry attorney Mark Pestronk, Travel Weekly's Legal Briefs columnist, urges agents to include in disclaimers, especially for its travel advisories.
I sat down recently with Michelle Bernier-Toth, the managing director of Overseas Citizens Services at the State Department, to talk about what her department does and what she wants travel advisors to know.
Speaking during a panel at the recent ASTA Global Convention, Bernier-Toth discussed how the State Department gathers information. It uses its network of embassies and consulates around the world, which provide real-time information on risks and developments the traveling public needs to know. Then, the department disseminates that information via its website and to travelers enrolled in its Smart Traveler Enrollment Program.
She encouraged agents to sign their clients up for the program.
The State Department rates each country on how safe it is to visit, with a travel advisory ranking from Level 1 to Level 4, with Level 4 being the most dangerous. The department can also send out alerts from its embassies with more immediate messages, like about demonstrations, so travelers can get that information as quickly as possible.
The department revamped its country-rating system in January 2018. In an interview after the panel, Bernier-Toth said the new system has garnered positive feedback. Most find it easy to understand, she said, and it enables the department to talk about more specific regional threats.
While the State Department always strives to be prepared for the next big crisis, whatever it may be, it deals more often with the individual emergencies of people living and traveling abroad, Bernier-Toth said. That could be lost passports, assaults or any number of things.
"It's just a very broad range of services that we would provide depending on what people need from us," she said. "It's just making sure we're providing that service in a timely fashion, in a way that when people need it, we're there to help them out."
Bernier-Toth looks at the department's relationship with travel advisors as a partnership. And she said she's very pleased that the term shifted to advisor from agent "because I think that's the role that they do play, and it's a very important one.". The department offers advisors a single place where they can go and learn how the U.S. government views any foreign country.
She also wanted travel advisors to know that the department is bound to disseminate any information that it believes is specific, credible and non-counterable.
"We have to put that out to the public," she said. "That predicates, and is the basis for, all of our consular information."