Planning for the worst….. do you have a disaster web communication plan?

I have tried to write this post a few times over the previous months - as each time I think I am going to write it - something comes up (like a travel disaster such as an aeroplane crash) and I consider it to be in bad taste to use that kind of thing as the prompt of a post.

This time, everyone survived:

Lets face it - in the travel business - events happen. It could be fires in Greece, a hurricane in the Caribbean or a airline falling out of the sky. For more local tour operators it could be a minibus crash or a break out of food poisoning. None of this is very nice. The key difference between this kind of event and other, more personal, tragedies (such as a death in resort - which all tour operators have to handle from time to time) - is that these larger scale events require fast and informative communication to go out to:

• Family of those currently travelling with you
• Those shortly to travel with you
• Mainstream press / media
• Potential customers - showing that you are on top of the situation
• Agencies (such as Government, health, police, fire etc)

There tend to be two levels of event that need to be handled:

1. General situations relating to a destination, resort or hotel - that are useful to communicate - and may be additionally communicated to customers through some other means (such as email, telephone, SMS or postal letter).
2. Serious situations where in essence the company stops trading and moves to “disaster mode”. (Such as an aeroplane crash etc)

An example of type 1 would be how Hotwire place their travel advisories at the top of their website:

The business keeps on trading but all web visitors are made aware that there is information that they may find useful to read.

One large airline I project managed a web project a few years ago suggested that 50% of the time they would be at “level 1″ - requiring a message like this to be linked to from their homepage.

Level 2 events are rare - and can lead to a bit of a mad scramble in travel companies to change their website to be appropriate for the event.

In preparation, some companies have a prepared “level 2″ website that is pre-made - that is in essence a blogging platform with a very neutral, sober, web design - that can be placed “live” in such a way that the entire homepage is replaced with the new website with a single mouse click (and appropriate authority). Ongoing communications can then be published effectively throughout the incident until normal corporate communications can take over again.

Aspects to consider:

1. Who is able technically to put a website into “Level 1 or Level 2″ mode? In larger tour operators it is the resort or operational duty team that can normally do this (without the help of any IT or ecommerce support).
2. What business procedures would be required to authorise moving to this mode of operation? (One tour operator I know requires a phone call to be made to a duty director - even out of hours - before taking this decision)
3. For the smaller companies - if you had to do this without the help of your web designer - could you do it?

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