Recently, in the corner of a bar, sat a tired man, leaning quietly over a glass of liquid comfort. I asked him why he was so disconsolate. He explained that he was a director of a travel company - a tour operator offering villa holidays in Europe, and he had recently had a bit of a shock.
At two o’clock on a Sunday morning, a phone call told him that four of his clients, being driven from the airport to their villa, had been involved in an accident when their minibus was hit by a speeding taxi. Two clients were killed and one was in hospital.
The shock, he admitted, was that this incident had not conveniently happened between 9 and 5 on a weekday, when he could easily get hold of whichever staff he needed to help manage the crisis.
In fact he had several shocks:
- How long it took to get some of his staff together, to work out what to do. How to handle calls to relatives.
- How to contact the next of kin of one of the deceased, whose travel agent had refused to pass on any next of kin contact details.
- How to quickly get a member of staff flown out to the site of the accident.
- How intrusive the media had been – door-stepping to get the story.
- How to handle the abusive calls from relatives of the deceased, with one of them traumatising his untrained staff by calling to say ‘so you are the people who killed my daughter’.
- How to find trauma counsellors to fly out to the injured client and to work with the relatives of the two clients who were killed.
- How to keep the business going whilst the crisis preoccupied most of his staff.
All in all he had had several shocks upon realising how ill-prepared he and his staff were to handle such a crisis. Now he was just trying to recover from the whole episode.
But it need not have been like that.
He could have had the foresight to have prepared a crisis manual, detailing the several teams needed to handle the different aspects of such a crisis – clients, relatives, accident site management etc. It would also have told him how to deal with the press with a timely initial press release to contain the story when the press arrived an hour after the story broke.
He and his team could also have had an annual role play session, to practice using the manual.
If his company was a member of Aito, and he had taken out Aito’s crisis management insurance policy (at a cost of a mere 15p / 20p per passenger carried), that would have covered much of the above at no extra cost to him; the insurance would have organised trauma counsellors and lawyers, plus PR assistance and other expert back-up for him. And the Aito Noticeboard - our intranet - would have provided advice and help from fellow members who had undergone similar experiences.
It always surprises me how many companies do not put a crisis management plan in place; simply assuming that it will never happen to them.
And the garden fence? Painting the garden fence gets put off time and time again because there is no deadline for doing it. Just as many companies put off preparing a crisis manual because there is no deadline for doing it.
Not getting round to painting the garden fence is not the end of the world. But not having a crisis plan in place when a crisis hits your business could mean the end of the world for your company.
Derek Moore is chairman of the Association of Independent Tour Operators
