“THERE is no place in the world where there are no business travelers,” said Patrick Deroose, the manager of the corporate assistance division of the worldwide crisis response company International SOS.

That includes Haiti, of course. Last week, when the calamitous earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, workers at the company’s international alarm center in suburban Philadelphia counted more than 100 clients from private companies, government agencies and nonprofit groups  with about 2,500 individual travelers  in Haiti. Within hours, a crisis team was on the move.

“We keep a deployment kit in the office, everything we need to go on a moment’s notice,” said Alex Puig, the regional security director. Mr. Puig, a former agent for the Central Intelligence Agency who later worked as an international corporate security chief, said he dispatched two crisis specialists to the Dominican Republic less than two hours after the first news flash went out about the Haiti earthquake.

“They always have their documents and their flyaway travel bags ready,” he said. A phone call to an airline yielded two hard-to-get seats from Philadelphia to Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, the nation that shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Within 24 hours, the two-man advance team was on the ground establishing communications in devastated Port-au-Prince as a vanguard for medical and other emergency teams that followed.