The incidents at two hotels in Mumbai this week will have had many people who visit the city regularly thinking “What if it had been me?”.

An increasing number of business travellers have been going to Mumbai in recent years. Airlines - with the exception of Bmi which withdrew from the route – have been increasing their services to the city too. In fact, more than a million passengers flew on the route between Heathrow and Mumbai in 2007, according to the Civil Aviation Authority, many of them travelling on business.

The hotels at the centre of this week's attacks – the Taj Mahal Palace and the Trident Oberoi – are among the most popular for business travellers to the city. It comes as no surprise to find that many of those caught up in the attacks were there on behalf of their companies. Andreas Liveras, the yachting millionaire who was killed during the attacks, was in the city to attend a trade show. It seems certain that when the full death toll is known, many more business travellers will have been embroiled in the situation.

But many companies will have been unaware that their travellers were staying in the hotels in the first place.

Ever since 9/11, business travel agencies and travel technology companies have been developing so-called traveller tracking systems that are supposed to keep tabs on the location of a company’s travellers at any given instant. Yet these sophisticated systems are only as good as the information that goes into them.

Business travel agency HRG says that more than 200 business travellers whose trips it had arranged were in the city when the attacks happened. The company’s director of client management, Stewart Harvey, said: “We had some travellers in those two hotels and we were able to pick them out and send reports to our clients telling them who was in the city and who was in what hotel. We gave them names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers.”

But sometimes the information held by the travel agency is incomplete. “We often have an air booking for someone and we don’t have a matching hotel. When we look in the notes, we see it says that they are making their own hotel booking or their local company office has made the booking,” says Harvey.

Nigel Turner, director of industry affairs at another business travel agency Carlson Wagonlit, agrees that business travellers making their own bookings is a problem in such cases. “If people do book their flights and hotels separately themselves, it is incidents like this it shows the worth of having a single tracking system.”

The company, which had a number of travellers in the Taj Mahal Palance and Trident Oberoi, has a two-tier traveller tracking system. Corporate travel managers can check online to see if any of their travellers are in the city. “We run another set of reports internally which our programme managers use to be proactive on the off-chance that our clients do not know of an incident.

Now that the hostage situations at the hotels are drawing to a close, what happens next for companies who have travellers who have plans to travel to the city in the coming days and weeks?

The Foreign and Commonwealth office has advised that only essential travel to Mumbai is recommended for the foreseeable future. Yet many companies will not be in a position to keep their travellers at home if their business depends on it, especially given the growing importance of Mumbai on the international commercial scene.

HRG’s Harvey says: “Many of our corporate clients have an over-arching security policy which they implement immediately and are using it to tell their own people what to do. Most major corporations are highly cosmopolitan organisations so the view of a particular government, while important, may well be superseded by the guidance of a corporate’s own security policy, which is driven by safety, human resource laws and a company’s own corporate culture.”

CWT’s Nigel Turner said the company was listening to its own clients too. “It is down to each individual and each customer what they plan to do. It is the same as with the airlines: some have cancelled flights indefinitely, some have cancelled individual flights and others have carried on as normal. It is the same with our corporates.”