Duke Launches New Travel Registry

The street lights were out as Duke associate professor of the practice David Boyd walked back to his guest house in Johannesburg, South Africa, feeling his way through the dark on uneven sidewalks.

He fell, and the impact with the cement cut his forehead open. Boyd, who was in South Africa to conduct research on traditional healers, suddenly needed to see a healer.

Luckily, before he left for South Africa that summer of 2013, Boyd entered his travel information into the Duke Global Travel Registry. Since he was in the system, Duke was able to help coordinate his health insurance information for the seven stitches and monitor proper care.

“Accidents are always unplanned,” said Boyd, who works at the Duke Global Health Institute. “It’s better to take these few minutes to register on the travel registry and have peace of mind in case anything happens.”

Duke staff and faculty planning an international work trip are encouraged to register their work travel in the new simplified Duke Global Travel Registry. Staff and faculty can sign in with their NetID and password and fill out an express registration form that only requires arrival date, departure date and destination. Employees can choose to fill out a standard registration, which includes optional fields for emergency contact, passport, visa, lodging and transportation information. There is also the option to register for a colleague.

Submitting information to the online database helps Duke officials locate faculty, staff and students who are abroad if there is an emergency or natural disaster or if a Duke community member gets injured or ill. Last year, Duke staff and faculty took 4,374 international trips but less than 2 percent submitted their travel information to the old registry.

Eric Mlyn, chair of the Duke Global Travel Advisory Committee and the Peter Lange Executive Director of DukeEngage, hopes the new travel registry will increase overseas travel registrations among staff, faculty, and graduate students. Registration is only mandatory for undergraduate students for Duke-related trips and for graduate and professional students planning to travel to a destination on Duke’s Restricted Regions List. The Duke travel registry isn’t for trips unaffiliated with Duke.

“When a crisis happens in the world, whether that’s the terrible terrorist attack in Paris or Brussels or Turkey, we immediately need to know if we have Duke people there,” Mlyn said. “This allows us to bring a wide range of resources to members of the Duke community who find they made need some help.”

Christy Parrish Michels, senior manager of Duke Global Administrative Policies and Procedures, monitors global travel conditions and helps reach out to Duke community members if there is an international emergency or disaster.

The day of the Paris terrorist attacks last November, Duke officials made contact with undergraduate students traveling abroad within hours of the attacks because their information was in the travel registry.

Michels and other administrators received dozens of emails about Duke staff and faculty who might have been in Paris at the time of the incident, and they spent days following up on leads. If Duke employees had their information in the travel registry, Duke officials could have more easily and quickly located and contacted individuals who were in Paris or traveling in that region at the time of the attacks.

“The whole weekend, it was us, by word-of-mouth, just trying to figure out who was there and reaching out to them to see if they were OK,” Michels said.

When employees enter their information into the new travel registry, Duke has the ability to locate Duke travelers by pinpointing them on a world map. Duke officials can send customized messages to travelers by city, country or region that can quickly determine their safety.

“This new registry will definitely make it easier for people,” Michels added. “That’s really what we’re looking for, a faster way to locate them and a faster way to reach them."