In Egypt, Only Essential Business Travelers Remain They've been through the drill there before, but global security and medical response companies say that deteriorating security conditions throughout Egypt have reduced the number of foreign business travelers there to workers who are deemed necessary. "We had several thousand clients there before the summer, but we're down now to probably only a couple of hundred people in-country, mostly corporate people staying in facilities just outside of Cairo where they feel potentially less impacted than people would be in hotels," Bruce McIndoe, the chief executive of iJet International, a global risk management and response company based in Annapolis, Md., said on Monday. Last month, when the turmoil began accelerating, corporate travel managers with employees in Egypt were reminded once again of the growing importance of so-called duty-of-care legal provisions in countries around the world. When applied to traveling employees, those provisions hold corporate executives responsible for maintaining risk management travel policies to help ensure safe working conditions. Among other things, employers are expected to know where their traveling employees are, to regularly evaluate security and safety conditions in places where they send employees and to be able to communicate with them. Employers also are generally expected to have emergency procedures, including those for getting employees out quickly. I will add here that business travelers, especially those in places where civil turmoil or natural disasters are factors, also have responsibilities, beyond the legal obligations of their employers. Even the most carefully managed corporate travel risk systems begin to fail when travelers in such circumstances book out of policy - that is, freelance their own arrangements that a manager back home can't keep track of in an emergency. Communication is a two-way street. In Egypt, where major corporations like Royal Dutch Shell have closed offices and cut off nearly all business travel, companies with travelers still in the country have mostly pulled back to secured areas, where conditions are being monitored hour by hour. Business travelers in Egypt are mostly "people working on various kinds of contracts that they don't want to depart. They're mainly people who have an essential need to be there at this point," said John Rendeiro, the vice president for security and intelligence at International SOS, a global security and medical emergency response company based near Philadelphia. "Most of our clients had already drawn down the nonessential folks" since early summer, he said. Most of those who remain "are in corporate lodging, and they're mainly essential people who have really good reason to be there and already have a pretty good security posture," he said. Now, travel risk experts say, the basic requirements are caution and good information. Emergency plans and communications systems should be carefully evaluated, they add. Few business travelers still in Egypt need to be reminded of the basic precautions issued in government travel alerts worldwide, like avoiding mobs. Most who are still in Egypt know the landscape by now. And indications are that security conditions are going to worsen, at least in the short term, they agree. We have our travel services on the ground, where we already had networks of security providers, medical providers who are constantly monitoring the situation. These are people who essentially know the neighborhood very well already," Mr. Rendeiro said. "What we're telling people now is don't send people there if they're not there already," Mr. McIndoe said. So far, most of the transient people we have pulled out went out on commercial flights, but that is complicated by the curfew. At the busy Cairo International Airport, which handles 16 million passengers a year, flight delays were mounting over the weekend, in some cases stretching to 12 hours and more. But delays were minimal by Monday afternoon. One major factor in air travel was the curfew imposed last Wednesday in much of the country, causing logistical challenges for passengers, flight crews and airport employees. There were also some problems caused by limited access and checkpoints on airport approach roads. "In the last couple of days we've been working through the curfew," Mr. McIndoe said. In recent days, he added, the company has moved out more than two dozen clients who opted to leave simply because security measures on travel liability insurance policies had been activated by rapidly deteriorating conditions. Airport officials are struggling to accommodate the growing numbers of travelers at the airport, including those backed up at visa and immigration and ticket counters where staffing was a problem as some employees found it difficult to get to work. But the curfew remains the biggest challenge, and Mr. McIndoe said that his company had been transporting clients to the airport in security vehicles. "Basically, we're working with the airlines to make sure we secure seats," he said. And we're also transporting people in convoys, with a lead vehicle probing for roadblocks or other issues. Partly because of assumptions that the Egyptian military will be able to control unrest on the streets, and given the solid communications and transportation in place in Egypt, there is no obvious sense of panic among the foreign business travelers who remain. Nevertheless, Mr. Rendeiro said, "We have arranged for planes on standby, in case they're needed."