Employee Relocation Services

Employee relocation is more than moving boxes from A to B. A structured programme touches immigration, housing, schooling, cost management, duty of care, and reporting, and the coordination demands across those workstreams are significant. 

Gerson provides end-to-end relocation management. Your internal team has a single point of contact for every aspect of a move. We manage the supply chain, communicate directly with the relocating employee, and give you visibility through our reporting platform.

International household moves are handled by our own operations team and a vetted global network. We manage packing, customs documentation, shipping, delivery, and unpacking, with real-time tracking throughout. 

Destination services

On-the-ground support in the host location, including home search, area orientation, school search, settling-in visits, and bank account setup. These services reduce the time an employee spends distracted by logistics and get them productive in their new role sooner.

Visa and immigration

Case management for work permits, visas and immigration across key destination markets. We work with an established network of immigration specialists and coordinate directly with your employee and their family.

Temporary accommodation

Serviced apartment and short-term housing sourcing when employees need temporary accommodation before their permanent accommodation is arranged. We manage supplier relationships and handle all booking logistics.

Policy management and advisory

Support for building, reviewing, or benchmarking your relocation policy — whether you’re running a single assignment type or a multi-tier programme covering domestic transfers through to executive VIP moves.

Programme reporting and technology

Access to our reporting platform, giving your mobility or HR team real-time visibility across active assignments, cost tracking, and compliance status. See how we approach programme management.

For most HR Business Partners, relocation sits alongside a full workload of business partnering, people projects, and operational HR. It’s rarely the primary focus. When it goes wrong, it becomes one quickly.

The pressure points we see most often:

• No central process. Moves are handled case by case, with informal arrangements and inconsistent employee experiences. When headcount grows or assignment volumes increase, the lack of structure becomes a serious problem.
• Unclear cost ownership. Relocation costs sit across multiple budget holders — HR, finance, the business unit — and tracking total programme spend requires significant manual effort.
• Compliance risk. Immigration timelines, right-to-work obligations, and host-country tax requirements are easy to underestimate, particularly in markets where the regulatory environment changes frequently.
• Employee dissatisfaction. A relocating employee who receives poor support will say so — to colleagues, on review platforms, and in exit interviews. The reputational cost is real.

Working with Gerson takes these off your plate. We bring a structured process, a dedicated account manager, and the operational infrastructure to handle volume without quality dropping. You stay focused on your people strategy; we handle the mechanics.

No two relocation programmes are the same. The needs of a fast-growing tech company placing engineers in Singapore look different from a professional services firm managing partner secondments to New York, which looks different again from an industrial business transferring operational staff across European sites.

We work with HR teams across sectors to build programmes that reflect their specific assignment mix, budget parameters, and employee demographics — choosing the right policy structure, defining the right service tiers, and building a delivery model that scales as the business grows.

Core-flex policy design

Many of the companies we work with are moving away from one-size-fits-all relocation packages towards core-flex models: a defined set of must-have services, with a flexible layer that employees can tailor to their circumstances. We support both the design and the administration of these programmes.

Lump sum programmes

For companies that prefer to give employees a defined budget and let them manage their own move, we provide lump sum management services — guidance on appropriate allowance levels, counselling for employees on how to use their budget effectively, and exception handling when employees need support beyond what their allowance covers.

Group moves

When business decisions require moving a function or a site population, the logistics and communications challenges multiply fast. We have experience managing group move programmes — coordinating multiple household moves, running group briefings, and managing the employee relations dimension alongside your HR and communications teams.

Executive and VIP moves

Senior hires and executive transfers require a different level of service. Our executive and VIP programmes include a dedicated consultant, white-glove destination services, and premium household shipping, with direct communication with the individual throughout.

The relocation market covers a wide range of suppliers, from technology platforms with light-touch service models to large global relocation management companies with significant overhead costs. Gerson occupies a specific position: genuinely global delivery capability, backed by our own UK operations team and a vetted international network, without the complexity and cost structure of the largest enterprise players.

Dedicated account management. The HR teams we work with consistently tell us that access to someone who actually knows their programme is one of the most important things a relocation provider can offer. Every client has a named account manager who understands their policy, their supplier preferences, and how they want employee communications handled.

Compliance and accreditation. Procurement teams and HR leaders evaluating relocation providers need to know their supplier meets the governance standards their organisation requires. Gerson holds industry accreditations and operates to the quality and environmental standards you would expect of a provider working with enterprise clients.

Cost transparency. Relocation spend is difficult to track when fees are buried in third-party markups. We work with clients on cost models that give full visibility — management fees, supplier costs, and exception spend — so that finance and HR can report accurately on programme expenditure.

A well-structured relocation starts before the employee is told they’re moving. The earlier your mobility provider is involved, the better the outcome for programme costs and employee experience.

Gerson manages employee relocations to and from the UK and internationally across key assignment corridors. Our destination network covers major business centres across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific.

Common assignment destinations include the United States, Canada, Australia, Dubai and the wider UAE, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and South Africa. Our network extends well beyond these.

We have case studies covering a number of these corridors — including moves to Boston, USA, Sydney, Australia, Milan, Italy, and Cape Town, South Africa — which demonstrate how we manage the full process across different assignment types and markets.

For moves to markets where our direct experience is more limited, we work with specialist in-country partners and bring in immigration and destination services expertise as needed. We’re clear about where we have deep-rooted capability and where we rely on vetted third-party networks.

The logistics of relocation are manageable. The human dimension is harder.

An employee who relocates internationally is managing significant personal disruption: a new home, a new city, often a new country and language, and in many cases a family adapting at the same time. The support they receive during that transition has a direct effect on their performance, their engagement, and whether they complete the assignment at all.

Assignment failure — an employee returning early from an international posting — is expensive. Replacement costs, productivity loss, and the effect on the employee’s confidence all add up. Most failures aren’t caused by performance issues. They’re caused by relocation support that didn’t meet the employee’s actual needs.

Our destination services are designed with this in mind. We work with employees to understand what matters most to them and their family, and build a support plan around those priorities. Where employees and partners need additional support — spousal career counselling, cultural training, language coaching — we can arrange