Tourism Risk Management - Sustainable Tourism Online

• Discussion Exercises
A discussion exercise produces a situation and crisis management problems for participants to
address. It depends upon a highly skilled facilitator and is a very effective and cost efficient method of
testing plans, procedures and personnel. Whilst it does not produce all the pressure of crisis
conditions, participants are required to think and react under some pressure.
• Functional exercises
These are exercises which allow participants to practise information processing, resource
management and decision-making skills in a crisis operations centre environment. These test the
management of events and expose members of the crisis management team to considerable
pressure and they are critical to developing a high level of preparedness to respond to crises.
Importantly, though, exercises need not always be a formal procedure necessitating planning,
development and the use of a skilled facilitator. Destinations can use crises experienced by other
destinations to consider their own level of preparedness. Such informal exercises are based upon
personnel discussing the following simple questions against a given scenario:
• What would we do if that happened in our region?
• What would be the implications of such a crisis for our business operations?
• How would it affect visitors and potential travellers?
• What would we do about it?
• What are the problems which we would have to face?
• How would media and public relations issues be managed?
• Do we need any additional training, equipment or other resources to manage such a crisis?
• How would tourism here be affected if it happened at a nearby destination?
Training and exercising should be ongoing processes if you are to develop and maintain the high
level of preparedness necessary for an efficient and effective response to a crisis. That depends, at
least in part, on the development of an appropriate attitude: one which identifies the need for crisis
preparedness activities to become a part of normal business routine, not merely isolated or
occasional measures adopted to satisfy a formal requirement.
The Tourism Crisis Planning Process
Crisis planning is a PROCESS. A written plan is just one outcome of the ongoing process, but it’s not
an end point. A planning committee cannot rest on its laurels once the plan has been produced.
Personnel must be trained and tested; plans must be regularly tested, reviewed and updated.
Destinations should learn from the crises which other destinations experience and incorporate those
lessons into their own preparedness activities.
A crisis management plan will get you started in a crisis. Planning must continue during crisis
response and recovery operations, when the crisis management team will have to develop short-term
plans for the following few hours of operation (known as tactical plans) and longer-term plans for the
following 24 to 48 hours (strategic plans). As the team assesses the situation and decides upon
essential tasks and priorities in response and recovery, so plans have to be developed for their
implementation. This is not a complicated process, but a normal business approach where a
management team determines what needs to be done and how they will go about it.
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