‘Kate, we have a situation’

Kate Fitzpatrick still remembers the day. It was Monday afternoon February 6, 2023, and she was traveling from her home in the UK to the South of France. The plan was to spend time with her sister, who was unwell, and to look after her kids. When she landed at the Toulouse airport, her phone buzzed. Nothing particularly unusual about that. But it buzzed again. And again and again. It didn’t stop. Something, she thought, must be wrong. It was. So much for those plans.

Earlier in the day, the news broke of a devasting earthquake in southern Turkey and Syria. Soon after, while Kate was in the air, came the powerful 7.7 aftershock, and now a client of World Travel Protection was in danger. The client escaped the tremor with her life but was suddenly without her passport and belongings and had no idea how to get back to her native Australia. For Kate – EMEA’s Regional Security Director of World Travel Protection, a part of Zurich Cover-More, Zurich’s global travel insurance businesses – her time off would have to wait. Duty called. But she was ready, as always.

She offered practical, calming advice – where to go, what to do – by phone and through regular texts. She also provided a metaphorical shoulder to lean on. At one point Kate wrote: “To reiterate, you have my number, call me anytime.” And she meant it because that’s who Kate is – whether it’s her own family that’s in need or a client she’s never met before – and that’s what World Travel Protection does. It provides expert travel, medical and security assistance by helping travelers prevent and mitigate risks – and to get them what they need if and when they do eventually need it. The client wrote back to Kate expressing her gratitude for the support.

‘Educate, locate, communicate’

“This job is non-stop, that’s just how it is,” she said recently from World Travel Protection’s new screen-laden London Command Center (see photo, top). “I understand it’s 24-7, that’s how we work, and I love it. I know, it sounds weird. I can’t explain it.”

Asked what it meant for her time off with her own family, she laughed. “I was a little distracted,” she says, “but I didn’t mind because I could hear the panic in the client’s voice, and I thought that she was in real danger there. I just wanted to make sure she was OK.”

As part of her role, Kate helps prepare various clients – whether businesses, governments or organizations – before they visit high-risk locations, and once there she and the team provide support. She’s also on call at the Command Center. It’s operated by about 50 people, day and night, and is packed with TV monitors, a live tracking system, call data and news feeds, all to aid insured travelers dealing with a crisis. (World Travel Protection also has Command Centers in Brisbane and Toronto.) “What we offer is really quite special,” says Kate, who has over 25 years of experience in security. “We educate, locate, communicate. That’s our ethos.”

World Travel Protection’s Command Center in Brisbane, Australia.

To put it another way, Kate is a bad-ass, but one with a big heart. Maybe it’s her sing-song Cheshire accent, but she has an undeniable warmth. Once you start talking to her, even if it’s you asking the questions, she manages to put you at the center of attention. She’s curious, she listens. This is someone you want in your corner. If she wasn’t in the security business, she’d make a great Hollywood agent: She’d protect you in the shark-infested waters of La-La Land, boost you up, and make you feel important. And she’d be the first person you’d thank when you bring home the prized gold statuette.

But as much as you might want to hang out with Kate, she’s got places to go, people to see. In a couple of days, despite a lingering cough that causes her to mute the Teams call out of politeness, she will be on a business trip for a week, and then, out of nowhere the phone will ring. “It will be a case manager, and they’ll say, ‘Kate, we have a situation, can you take the call?’ ” The thing is, it’s usually not phrased as a question. “I might not get all the background. It could just be ‘assault, in whatever country, drug-related, they’ve been mugged, they’ve been raped, they’ve been to the police, but the police may be corrupt, and they’ve been no help.’

“I’m security,” she continues. “I don’t advise on policy, I don’t get involved in insurance, I don’t say yes or no to costs. That’s not my job. My job is purely to be advisory and help them in a difficult situation. It’s like, ‘OK, you need to do this. Did you think about this? What about this?’ That’s where I come in.”

A (security) star is born

Kate was always fascinated with law enforcement and studied forensic science in school. When she was 21, she got an apprenticeship at Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She was with them for years before shifting over the National Crime Agency, the equivalent of the British FBI. While there, she was deployed to Afghanistan, where she stayed for two-and-half years, before being sent back to the UK “to decompress.” But, she says, “it wasn’t the same. It was boring sitting doing surveillance of a drug dealer.”

When she was in Afghanistan, she had made some valuable connections – and friends for life – and one day she got a phone call asking if she’d be interested in working for the European Union to be its intelligence analyst based in Kabul. Her response? “One hundred percent, yes please.”

She resigned from the British government, and three weeks later she was back in Afghanistan – because she enjoyed it. “The work was so interesting,” she says. “People don’t get this, and they probably think I’m a bit mad, but I’m not. It kind of felt like you were alive, you know? That you were doing something. I can’t explain it. It’s something only those who lived and breathed it will understand.”

Kate looked after 28 ambassadors of the European Union, a hugely important role that combined her background in both security and intelligence. She would also meet with a host of different governmental intelligence agencies and global secret services – “everyone was thrown into the pitch,” as she endearingly puts it. She had to brief the ambassadors every Sunday morning on where they could go, what they could do, where to stay away from, where there were threats. Sometimes it got confrontational. They were ambassadors, after all, and weren’t used to being told what to do. Now, Kate is nice – she’s really nice – but she doesn’t take you-know-what. “So I was like, ‘But Sir, Madam, I’m telling you this because I’ve got reliable intelligence that there’s going to be something happening in that location so we advise you to stay away.” They listened.

After a few more years in Afghanistan, she was approached by the Bill Gates Foundation to help get a new health initiative off the ground in Nigeria, where she was charged with keeping medical staff safe while moving around the country – before handing the project over to local advisers.

She calls the rigors of living abroad, often in danger zones, “a young person’s game, especially when your parents are getting older. You know when your time is up, if you get what I mean.” So she moved back to Europe to work for a gas firm and then a gaming company, where she looked after the CEO who would get several death threats daily, with the office getting regular bomb threats. (So much for fun in games.)

‘Woman to woman’

In 2022, she landed at World Travel Protection, and it’s been non-stop ever since. Whether it’s a reconnaissance trip to Sierra Leone to give her security assessment for a corporation; fielding those calls (recently, it was advising someone who was assaulted in Spain); or helping a client plan a trip to Pakistan, which had special resonance for Kate from her time in Afghanistan.

“She was a blue-eyed blond from Europe, traveling solo, and had never been to the Mideast before,” Kate says. She would have to go to Lahore alone and would then have to travel through the mountains. “She was scared out of her wits.”

Kate had a couple of long meetings with the client before she left. They went over what she was likely to see, what it would feel like, how you would need to behave, how to be mindful of your body language, what you wear. As Kate explains: “You’ll need someone to pick you up at the airport, a fixer. You’re going to need to know your route. If you’re stopped, you need to know how to act, basic language skills, to respect the nation you’re in. So put on a wedding ring even if you’re not married cause that’s a big thing in certain counties. Cover your head. Take a phone with you but not your own – get a burner phone with a local SIM. And download the World Travel Protection app so you can be tracked onscreen from the Command Center.”

By the departure date, Kate felt as if the client was equipped. And she was. When she returned, she wrote to Kate saying that the trip couldn’t have gone any better. “If she had been to Pakistan 10 times before, our briefing would have been very different. But it was her first time, and I’d like to think I gave her the confidence to deploy because she was generally scared. I knew what she was feeling. I could relate, woman to woman.”

And as a woman, Kate was often an outsider in the field of security, which has long been a bastion of masculinity. Early in her career, she felt that she was held back from promotions, even when her work was above and beyond. She feels as if private industry, and World Travel Protection in particular, is more accepting of women in stronger positions.

“In almost three years, I’ve never felt discriminated against in any way,” she says. “I’ve never felt less. I feel completely equal, and that’s the first time in my whole career I’ve ever felt that. I feel as if here I have a voice, that your opinion is valued. And I’m not just saying it to say it, I genuinely mean it. World Travel Protection doesn’t care what you are. You’re treated equally, and that’s massive.”

Photos: George Brooks (Fitzpatrick); World Travel Protection (Command Center).