AKE’s innovative thinking delivers collaborative solutions for duty of care and business continuity.

Global security and risk consultancy AKE International draws on crisis response experience and longstanding relationships with the hospitality sector to deliver unique services to support companies facing logistical challenges overseas.

Reporting in recent days has highlighted the challenges of those families and individuals stranded as a result of changing advice and regulation pertaining to COVID-19 while travelling or on holiday. Globally, there are many oil and gas businesses with expatriate teams and travelling personnel also facing these challenges and having to make decisions on the next necessary and appropriate actions to be taken.

Claire Fleming, Associate Director at AKE International, comments:

Organisations have dual - but very much connected - concerns at this time, (i) the health, safety and wellbeing of their personnel and (ii) business continuity. People are, after all, any business’s biggest asset.

We are all in unchartered waters. Times like this require us to think innovatively to find solutions to the challenges we all face as a result of COVID-19. 

In any crisis, where personnel are caught up in a situation that threatens their wellbeing, a decision point will be reached - whether to stay or go. Sometimes, that decision is taken out of your hands, as currently seen as a result of the pace of regulatory change across jurisdictions. As individuals and businesses alike are finding, these changes are reducing the options available to them. Windows for evacuation, for example, are closing.

From our experience we know that although hunkering down and staying put may seem irrational, from war zones to terrorist attacks and even natural disasters, it is sometimes the safest course of action. This is a real consideration for organisations now.

We have trained and managed security for high-end hotel groups globally over the last decade, leading to very close and trusted working relationships. Working collaboratively with these hotels and combining their facilities with our 30-year experience in crisis management and response, we are in a strong position to deliver temporary accommodation, quarantine support, end-to-end evacuation and isolation services.

Being able to make informed decisions is crucially important. By offering these services backed by our experience and ongoing analysis of the regulatory, logistical and geopolitical environments, we are working to ensure that decisions are made from a position of knowledge and to deliver workable solutions for our clients.

With time-served in every major conflict, crisis and reconstruction process in the last three decades, the collective experience at AKE comprises significant military (special forces), security (senior police), close protection and crisis management specialists, counter terrorism practitioners, critical care paramedics and an analytic team.