Managing Destination Crisis Communications...
Are you ready?

We listened to the news reports, we read the facts and figures and, probably, many of us wondered what it must have been like to experience, at first hand, the brutal force of Hurricanes Emily and Wilma last year.

Would we have been sufficiently prepared? How would we have coped? Don't miss Michael Hallé's insider account of how the Riviera Maya Crisis Communications Center battled to do its job. Then ask yourself the question... are you ready?

This very likely won't be the most enjoyable article you'll read in DMO World but, for many of us, it could be a wake-up call. Let's face it, the world has changed, and not necessarily all for the best. Open your local newspaper today and here is what you will find: Hurricanes, earthquakes, the tsunami, terrorism, unexpected building or office fires, basement or computer room floods, the growing threat of bird flu pandemic, SARS and, unfortunately, the list goes on.

Increasingly, the odds appear very high that sooner or later some of the readers of this very important newsletter - perhaps you - will be, by default, thrown into total chaos as you have to deal with a random CRISIS of one type or another. As destination managers, we don't get to pick the timing of a disaster, nor the type, but, when it hits, we'd better be prepared.

Naturally, the probability of having to deal with some type of crisis increases dramatically based upon your location. In our case, we are based in the Americas and work with clients in the Southern USA, Mexico and the Caribbean basin. Ah, you say, now you see where this is headed.

The year 2005 was a great year to forget. But we can't. We lost an office and a partner's home in New Orleans and then we took two severe hits with clients in Cancun and, to a lesser extent, the Riviera Maya on the Mexican Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.

In this article, we will focus our attention on the Riviera Maya Tourist Board, the Executive Director Eng., Dario Flota Ocampo, and the public relations firm they work with from New York City, Adams Unlimited. Our hope is that, perhaps, you might come e away with one new idea. One that perhaps, seemingly obscure today, will serve you well when you may need it in the future. Though our hope is that you never do.

That a disaster will strike one of us, is not a remote possibility. How we respond, as destination managers, could no doubt be the defining leadership moment of our careers. Think about it in these terms: You spend your entire career working hard and just one event can define who you really are as a professional and what your legacy will be.

Lest you think of me solely a writer of drama, let me assure you, I am not. There can be no greater drama than life itself. But I am positive, and as sure of this as I am of my own children and grandchildren, that when life picks you, you'd better be prepared.

Destination Background:
The Riviera Maya tourist region is a tropical paradise, stretching along 130 km of spectacular, powdery-white sand beaches, running south from Cancun to a small port known mostly to fisherman, as Punta Allen. The destination of Cancun currently has approximately 30,000 hotel rooms. The relatively new destination called the Riviera Maya will surpass that number by the end of the 2006 fiscal year.

To put our rapid growth in perspective... ten years ago, we had about 1,100 hotel rooms, mostly small, boutique-style properties of six or ten rooms, villas or beach-side bungalows. Rustic. Charming.

Today, the Riviera Maya is one of the fastest growing tourist regions anywhere, with well over 31,000 rooms, with annual occupancy running at over 85%. Between Cancun to the north and the Riviera Maya tourist region, the two destinations account for close to 40% of Mexico's total tourism revenues.

Over the course of the next ten years, the projected number of rooms will be over 75,000 and the market is rapidly shifting upscale, to the a luxury category. Names like Viceroy, Fairmont, Ruffles, Orient Express, Mandarin Oriental, Capella Hotels, Rosewoods, Banyon Tree, La Casa La Canta, and many more are reshaping the product offerings of this once sleepy area. And the big players are here in full force as well... Iberostar, Riu, AM Resorts, Barcelo, Melia and more.
The very nicely balanced market distribution looks like this:

45%    USA
31%    EU
13%    Canada
10%    Mexican Nationals
1%      South America

Lessons Learned:
In 2005, the Riviera Maya had the first of two rather unpleasant visitors and wake-up calls. On July 18th, Hurricane Emily came ashore just south of Playa del Carmen, the major municipality within the Riviera Maya, cross-channel to the west of the Island of Cozumel.

This hurricane, while nowhere near the awesome power of what was to come later in the year, tore along the costal communities and resorts from Cancun all the way to Tulum. The brunt of the damage from the storm was felt in Playa del Carmen and to the south. Cancun, this time, escaped relatively unharmed.

To be very clear, the hard issues to be prepared for during such natural disasters are all well in hand. Communities and State and Federal governments throughout Mexico have very well-articulated policies and procedures to cover the literal shutting down and boarding up of destinations and, when necessary, the total evacuation of tourists and residents alike. All in all, the destination was well prepared with shelter placement strategies, procedures, guest manifests from each hotel and their assigned shelter plans.

Coastal communities live in a constant fear during the hurricane season that a storm may hit as they have on occasion for thousands of years. Emily was no exception. The authorities were ready. But the last serious storm was back in 1988 - category five Hurricane Gilbert! But that was generations ago and the Riviera Maya was recognised as a legal tourist destination less than a decade ago.

Things were different now. Only a handful of 'old-timers' had ever been upfront and personal with a hurricane. We quickly learned that it was the 'soft infrastructure' that would cause the most destination image damage. Communications, or the lack there of, would be the real problem.

Trees were toppled, hotels were flooded by the fierce water-surges, electrical power lines were downed, highways were blocked and, more than anything, people were in shock. Denial, if you will.

My observation is that 'denial' is the primary issue at the heart and soul of terror. Whether the terror be humankind-instigated, as it was with the London subway bombings or the World Trade Centre, which hit without warning. Or through nature-induced events, where we sometimes, for days in advance, sit and follow our enemy, live, through online reports. Suffering as the threat moves ever-closer, like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

In the aftermath of Emily we found ourselves without the basic tools with which to communicate our status and reassure our audiences and markets. No internet, no computers, for there was no electricity, no working phone lines, no cell phone networks, no satellite connectivity. Preparations that were made to evacuate people had worked, but there was no way to let people know what was happening.

Although I hate to actually say it, terror wins when it wears you down. Naivety turns to cynicism. Optimism and youthful exuberance, no matter what your age, is replaced with a permanent fear and you begin to look at things very differently. It's like losing a parent. It changes you forever.

There is one undisputed fact regarding the North American media: When left to their imaginations and driven by the lack of strong advocates for the realities of occurrences resulting within the destination, media, for the most part, find comfort in sensationalism! Fear sells! Human suffering sells! Mass destruction sells even more!

We learned that the facts don't always have to be accurate. Most times, not even close. This, in my personal case, was the lesson I took away.

Hurrican Wilma
Then came Wilma: November, 20th - 22nd, 36 hours of hell.

Wilma was ugly. While I am sure, there were many scientific differences between Hurricane Gilbert back in 1988 (Category 5) and Wilma in 2005 (moved between Category 4 and 5), the obvious difference was that the speed of the system's movement was less than 5 km per hour. At that extremely slow pace, Wilma took more than 36 hours to enter, destroy and leave the North Eastern Coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.

First coming onto land over the Island of Cozumel, where it sat moving ever so slowly, back and forth across the tiny island, Wilma dealt a devastating blow to each shore it encountered. Over and over again.

Having once underestimated the capacity to be able to keep people accurately and consistently informed of unfolding events, especially the media, who by and large had demonstrated their near perfect acumen at being consistently wrong, and knowing full well that whatever happens we would need access to well defined channels through which to argue a case for accuracy, the Executive Director of the Riviera Maya Tourist Board, Eng Dario Flota, made an executive decision to activate our crisis communication centre based in Niagara Falls, Canada - a long way away from the turmoil of Wilma.

To access the media channels, Adams Unlimited's public relations officers formed the third point in the triangulated strategy, and began to prepare briefing notes and updates from their offices in New York City within the Rockefeller Centre.

Dario Flota stayed with his family in Cancun and monitored local emergency media and attended special briefings and other meetings with the State Governors' Emergency Procedures Task Force. With Wilma moving at a speed of only 5 km per hour, the time lag from where she first came ashore on Cozumel and to where she finally moved north to hit Cancun proper, was over 18 hours. The reports had ample time to begin to flow north to Cancun and then to the rest of the team. Everything it seemed was moving in a painful, slow motion.

We had already begun to get hourly reports on the evacuations and movements to shelters of the tourists that had been vacationing in Cancun, Cozumel and the Riviera Maya. In all, some 30,000 tourists were safely evacuated as part of the primary evacuation strategy. Because the storm lingered so long and was so intense, in some cases primary evacuation centers faltered, and people were moved, during the storm, to secondary centers.

In some cases it took days and even a week before the airports and highways could be accessed to move people out of the region. To the credit of the State Government of Quintana Roo, the hotels and municipalities, there was 'no loss of life' reported. And, despite living on canned tuna for weeks, everybody, physically at least, came through it well. No telling what the emotional damage was, but it was severe, it was confirmed.

Throughout the storm and into the aftermath, we spoke with Dario Flota Ocampo as regularly as technology would permit. Dario provided updates from President Fox, the Governor, the Secretary of Tourism and anyone else that had timely and relevant information. Even when there was no electricity, Dario would find any active phone or internet connection he could to an emergency line, long enough to hook up his laptop computer using the battery from the family automobile to send us the latest reports.

When we would lose communications with him entirely, we would somehow find another way into the market for updates.

The Riviera Maya Crisis Communications Center was fully prepared to manage communications including e-mail, international telephone calling through the Toll Free number in the USA and Canada 1-877-7-GO-MAYA. Trained professional operators with intimate knowledge of the destination immediately began responding to inquiries from people who had family or friends in the destination as well as those with plans to visit in the near future. While Hurricane Wilma made its way up the coast, hundreds of calls poured into the Crisis Communications Center from relatives, friends and family members of those stranded in area.

Another lesson learned during Emily in July is to never have your internet website server hosted solely within your destination. Have an off-site, out-of-market mirror website hosting service. And, most seriously, train several people in senior management, likely to be around during such times of crisis, to manage the websites. As it happened, the week Wilma hit I was trained in the basics, so this job fell to me. My crash course in website content management, FTP application management and link management, turned out to be one of the most powerful tools in our kit.

Fortunately for most of the central and southern portions of the Riviera Maya, on this particular day, Nature cut us a huge break. Wilma never actually came ashore at Playa del Carmen like Emily had, so for the most part the region was spared the devastation. 'It was still ugly', my good friends confide. 'It was sheer hell, we thought it would never end, but we are all alive', became their mantra!

Soon we became the center for real-time, honest and accurate information. In many cases, people told us we were the only honest source of information and when people's lives are in the balance, are we not obligated to be so? Is the media not also obligated to be accurate and truthful?

I promise you that if you are organised, with a single message, a clear repetitive voice and an accurate and honest channel of command and communication, you will come through disasters with your 'reality' intact.

Not the media version, but yours. Remember, that CNN and other major media outlets were reporting that the Riviera Maya was 'wiped out and totally lost'. Our hourly website updates, kept most people informed and links began to be populated for media outlets such as USA Today, the New York Times, CNN, FOX and many others.

'We received many calls and e-mails from people who had friends or family in the area that they could not reach through the normal channels,' said Joanne Mottola, the Operations Manager in Canada. 'We suddenly found that the center was the only source of timely and relevant news and we worked closely with Marie Rosa from the Riviera Maya's public relations company in New York City, Adams Unlimited, to update the website and other websites, with the most up-to-the-minute information possible.'

Media, tourists and concerned friends and relatives alike were all looking to the Riviera Maya website to clarify information that was circulating. We were so pleased that we could help provide accurate, timely information for all these people in this time of need for the Riviera Maya.

The crisis center reported constant activity, 22,618 minutes of support calls were logged, most between October 20th and 31st. More than 7,600 minutes were spent answering e-mail messages and another 6,500 minutes were spent gathering, researching and verifying information about people, evacuation status and hotel, airport and road conditions.

Within two weeks, tourists began to arrive once again to the Riviera Maya. While there was certainly serious damage, by the start of the December high season more than 90% of the hotel infrastructure was up and running. By the December holiday period, occupancies in the remaining inventory were at 100%.

There are many more stories that could and should be told about the devastation and recovery of Wilma. It's all a bit too fresh for most of those involved. As in every case of disasters, there are so many true heroes who give so much of themselves to help their fellow humankind. Be well. Be prepared!

Michael Hallé has been active in the tourism sector for over twenty-five years and is a founding partner, chairman and CEO of 10GATES Destination Segmentation Solutions, a concept which was born from years of leading edge research. He can be contacted via mike@10gates.com.

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