Being Safe and Secure Makes A Destination Competitive
Tourism Crisis Management
Travel and tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world but at the same time the sector is quite prone to diverse disaster risks. Every year, we hear about earthquakes, tsunami, tropical storms and floods devastating tourist destinations in the world. Climate change has raised the frequency of extreme weather that impact tourism destinations and transportation to a great deal. We are exposed to the threats of epidemics such as SARS, bird flu, Ebola, MERS and Zika. Acts of terrorism are no longer limited to certain disputed regions but everywhere on the globe including peaceful tourist destinations.
In order to keep the healthy growth of travel and tourism, it is essential to make the destinations safer and more secure; better prepared for any potential disaster risks to the visitors and to the industry.
Tourism crisis management entails developing measures, plans and manuals to promptly respond to disaster events in an adequate way to minimize the negative impact to visitors and the tourism industry. Well prepared destination and tourism business are quick to plan and take necessary actions for post disaster recovery.
We are delighted to dispatch our experienced consultants to support local governments, tourist associations and tourism-related businesses to develop tourism crisis management plan and manuals based on the estimation and analysis of potential crises in the destination. We facilitate seminars and workshops to invite local resources to participate in the development process of the plan and manual.
Overview
On-site consultation makes the plans more practical
We always begin our consultation with a site inspection. It is to see the destination site with our own eyes, assess the existing plans and communicate with the local stakeholders.
It occasionally happens that existing disaster management plans and evacuation manuals do not accurately reflect some of the critical potential risk factors for the tourism sector in the destination. It is very likely that the existing evacuation plan is based only on the number of residents while there are thousands of visitors at the site during the peak season.
We then discuss with the local authorities and stakeholders where and how they should evacuate such a big mass of people who are totally unfamiliar with the local geography, which is a good start of the project as they come to realize that the evacuation plan for the residents only does not work for evacuating visitors.
We encourage public and private collaboration
Public-private partnership is extremely important in successful tourism crisis management. Unlike risk reduction plan for the community residents, the local authority has no way of knowing who are staying in a hotel when a crisis event takes place unless they are shared with a list of guests by the hotel operator.
Evacuation of a tourist site with a large number of visitors is never successful without quick response by the employees of tourism business operators on the site.
The tourism crisis management plans and manuals we recommend emphasize the public and private collaboration in multiple aspects of procedures.
We make plans from visitors’ perspective.
Visitors are different from residents in many ways. First, they are unfamiliar with the local geography so that specific guidance is necessary when there is crisis event that require immediate evacuation. In addition, international visitors may have difficulty understanding the evacuation and safety guidance by the local people in their local language. Unlike local people, visitors want to return home after the first impact of the disaster is gone; support to send them back home is an important part of the tourism crisis management plan.
These are some of the examples to illustrate the difference between crisis management plan for residents and that for visitors. We always make plans from visitors’ perspective.
Recovery, the ultimate goal of crisis management
We believe the ultimate purpose of tourism crisis management is to recover the tourist traffic to the destination and tourist facilities that have once been disrupted following the disaster event.
Recovery phase is, however, often given an unfairly small weight in the ordinary disaster management plan, as their emphasis is often on safe evacuation of the affected site.
We help our clients develop a crisis management plan that also emphasizes the recovery phase, whose content includes the formation of recovery plan team, strategic recovery marketing, effective use of media and social media and funding for the recovery marketing activity expenses.
What We Do
Examples
- Research to assess the existing crisis management plan
- On-site assessment of the existing plan coupled with seminars and symposiums that raise tourism risk management awareness
- Assistance in developing tourism risk management plans and manuals
- We host workshops for designing and developing plans that focus on:
- Estimating and auditing potential crises and associated risks
- Estimating the probability of a crisis occurring and lost earnings in the event one does occur
- Prioritizing crises to be dealt with
- Developing a crisis response organization and dividing roles
- Planning evacuation sites, methods, and guidance
- Means of communication in the event of a crisis
- Basic crisis recovery and reconstruction planning, policies, and planning team organization
- Public support to continue the employment
- Financial aid to rehabilitate affected tourism resources and facilities and for recovery promotion activities
- Marketing and promotion toward recovery