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The Gulf aviation network is essentially grounded. Emirates, Qatar, Etihad — all severely disrupted. Dubai hotels have been hit by drone strikes. Airports in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Kuwait are closed. Twenty thousand flights have been cancelled and a million travelers are rethinking their plans.

If you’re watching this from somewhere else in the world thinking ‘glad that’s not us’ — that’s the wrong reaction. This is a global tourism problem. Those three airlines connect Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia to everywhere. When they go down, the entire travel network feels it.

Right now, a million travelers are looking for certainty. They’re nervous. They want reassurance. They want to know where it’s safe to go, what happens if they book and conditions change, and whether someone is actually thinking about them. The destinations that speak up first — with clarity, with empathy, with a real message — will capture that demand.

Acknowledge what’s happening. Your customers are watching the same news you are. If your marketing is still pushing ‘escape to paradise’ while people are sleeping in airport terminals, you look tone-deaf.

Answer the question they’re afraid to ask. Every potential guest right now is thinking: is it safe? Will my flight get there? What happens if things get worse? Answer those questions before they ask them.

Make it easy to say yes. Flexible cancellation. Rebooking guarantees. Remove the risk from the decision. Qatar is paying for stranded tourists’ hotel rooms and meals right now. You don’t have to go that far. But you need to show people that booking a trip in this environment isn’t a gamble.

Destinations that win in a crisis are the ones with the best communication. Most of them are saying nothing right now. Don’t be most of them.

Mike Tyson said it best: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. He was talking about boxing. He could have been talking about crisis planning.

Most organizations have some version of a crisis plan. A binder. A shared drive folder. Maybe a flowchart someone made three years ago. And almost all of them make the same mistake: they plan for what they think will happen. They write down the likely scenarios, map out the responses, and call it done. That’s bare minimum. That’s planning for the punch you can see coming.

There are three levels of crisis preparedness, and most organizations stop at level one.

Level one is the binder. You’ve identified the scenarios, written down who does what, maybe drafted a few holding statements. This is table stakes. It makes auditors happy. It does not prepare you for anything you didn’t already predict.

Level two is getting punched in the face. Real simulation. Spokespeople on camera. Curveballs mid-exercise. A journalist who doesn’t play nice. You find out where your team breaks before a real crisis does it for you. This is where organizations learn something.

Level three is getting punched a second time and measuring the difference. Did you adapt? Did you freeze? Where did communication break down? Where did it hold? You take what you learned and build it back into the plan. The plan evolves based on what you actually experienced, not what you assumed.

Most organizations are still at level one. They have a plan they’ve never tested, for a crisis they probably won’t face, managed by spokespeople who’ve never been under real pressure.

Find out where you break before the cameras do.

The first 60 minutes of a crisis will define everything that comes after. And most leaders spend them doing exactly the wrong things.

I’ve taken that call hundreds of times. A leader on the other end — scared, nervous, trying to figure out what to do next. Different industries, different countries, different crises. And the mistakes are almost always the same four.

The first mistake: they call the lawyer before anyone else. Legal’s first instinct is to protect you in court. Say nothing. Admit nothing. That is solid advice for a deposition. You’re not in a deposition. You’re in the court of public opinion, and that court is already in session. Every minute you spend on a conference call with legal is a minute someone else is writing your story.

The second mistake: they wait for all the facts. This one sounds responsible. It feels like the smart move. The problem? The world doesn’t wait for your fact-finding mission. While you’re gathering information, your customers and the media are filling the vacuum with speculation. You don’t need all the facts to say something. You need three sentences: here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, and here’s what we’re doing right now.

The third mistake: they talk about what happened instead of what they’re doing about it. The public doesn’t need a play-by-play of how you got here. They need to know you’re in control. Shift forward.

The fourth mistake: they underestimate how fast the story is moving. Leaders think in hours. The internet thinks in minutes. By the time you’ve scheduled a meeting to ‘align on messaging,’ the screenshots are already circulating.

The first 60 minutes are about one thing: showing up. With honesty. With urgency. With a plan that proves someone is in charge.

Goeasy, a publicly-traded Ontario lender, watched more than half its market value evaporate in a single day. Not because borrowers were missing payments. That’s a business problem. Business problems are manageable. It was because they got caught hiding it.

Their subsidiary, LendCare, was seeing rising delinquencies. Borrowers struggling. Payments not coming in. None of that is unusual for a subprime lender in a tough economy. What was unusual was the response: staff pulled unexpected payments from overdue accounts, restructured loans to make them look current, and did everything possible to keep the real picture off the books.

A short-seller called it out publicly. The company denied it. A spokesperson went on record: LendCare has never taken steps to suppress delinquency rates. Then the Toronto Star confirmed the whole thing. Internal records. Court filings. Staff testimony. The result? A $178 million charge and a 57% stock collapse in a single trading session.

Here’s what actually kills me about this story. The delinquency problem was real. It was going to come out eventually. It always does. The only question was whether it came out on their terms or someone else’s.

They had a chance to get ahead of it. A statement like ‘We’re seeing rising delinquencies. Here’s what’s happening and here’s our plan’ is painful. But that story doesn’t end with a 57% crash.

The cover-up didn’t protect them. It gave them a second crisis on top of the first one. They stopped being the company with bad loans and became the company that lied about bad loans. Those are very different reputational problems — and the second one is much harder to recover from.

If you’re sitting on bad news right now, thinking you just need a little more time to fix it before anyone notices: this is your cautionary tale.

Can you guarantee the water is safe?’ Six words. And most leaders freeze.

You can’t guarantee it. You know you can’t. Your lawyer knows you can’t. The journalist asking knows you can’t. So you hedge: ‘Well, we believe the water should be safe…’ And you just made the front page — in the worst way.

Here’s what nobody teaches you about the word ‘guarantee’: people don’t actually need one. They need to hear one. There’s a difference.

Watch what happens when you borrow the word rather than dodge it:

‘I can guarantee you that every resource we have is focused on making sure this water is safe.’

‘I guarantee we will not rest until we have answers for this community.’

You didn’t promise the water is safe. You didn’t lie. You didn’t overcommit. But you gave people the word their brain was desperate to hear, and you attached it to something you can actually deliver — effort, urgency, accountability.

Compare that to the hedge. ‘We believe it should be safe’ sounds like you’re already building yourself an exit. It signals that you’re thinking about your own legal exposure, not about the people in front of you. That is exactly what crowds hear, and exactly what they remember.

‘I guarantee we’re doing everything in our power’ sounds like leadership. Same facts, completely different outcome.

The technique works in any high-stakes communication situation. When someone asks you to guarantee something you can’t, don’t dodge the word. Borrow it. Attach it to what you can absolutely commit to — your effort, your values, your next steps — and you’ve answered the question without making a promise you can’t keep.

A major industry association called me after a break-in. What went missing wasn’t cash or computers — it was a laptop containing names, dates of birth, and addresses for their entire membership. The kind of personal information that makes people feel exposed.

Behind closed doors, leadership was running the math. Regulatory fallout. Member cancellations. Lost renewals. The number they kept landing on was north of $2 million in potential damage.

Some people in the room wanted to wait. Get more information. Figure out the legal exposure before saying anything.

I told them we were reaching out to every single member. Proactively. Before they heard it somewhere else.

We wrote a notification that led with empathy rather than legalese. Not ‘we regret to inform you’ — real, human language that said we know this is unsettling and here’s what we’re doing about it. We trained every frontline staff member on how to handle the angry calls, because they were coming and the worst thing you can do is let an unprepared voice be your first impression. We monitored every online mention and every internal conversation so we were never surprised. And we told members exactly what was changing internally so this wouldn’t happen again.

Yes, angry calls came. Fewer than they feared. And they didn’t last long.

The final damage? Zero lost memberships. Every single policy renewed. Not one dollar in lost revenue.

The $2 million crisis cost them nothing because they chose honesty over hiding.

For many leaders, the instinct after a breach is to go quiet until they have answers. That silence is where trust goes to die. The organizations that come through these moments intact are the ones that treat their stakeholders like adults — telling them what happened, what they’re doing about it, and what comes next.

Ring ran a heartwarming Super Bowl ad. A lost dog. A neighborhood of cameras. AI scans the footage. The dog gets found. The family is reunited. It was well-made and genuinely cute.

You know who didn’t think it was cute? The internet. Comments piled up fast: ‘Dystopian.’ ‘Terrifying.’ ‘Mass surveillance wrapped in a puppy.’

Within a week, Ring cancelled a major partnership. The founder started an apology tour. The company scrambled to explain that the feature people were upset about was… exactly what the product does. They apologized for accurately describing their own product.

This is a teaching moment, and not the one Ring intended.

There is a moment in every crisis when you have to make a clear-eyed decision: did we do something wrong, or did people not like what they heard? Those situations require completely different responses.

If you lied, own it immediately. If you did something harmful, fix it and say so. But if you told the truth and people didn’t like what they heard, that is not the time to grovel. The moment you apologize for something that’s true, you confirm every fear the crowd already had. You take ‘maybe this is a problem’ and turn it into ‘they know it’s a problem.’

Ring’s ad didn’t malfunction. Their communications did. They had a legitimate product doing what it was designed to do. They should have stood behind it — calmly, honestly, with respect for the concerns people raised — while making clear they weren’t going to apologize for making the thing they set out to make.

The wrong apology is worse than no apology at all. It trades your credibility for a moment of temporary pressure relief, and the pressure doesn’t even go away.

Mexican President Sheinbaum stepped in front of cameras and told the world Mexico ‘is calm.’

This was happening in the same moment that 70 people were dead, 10,000 troops were deployed, 250 roadblocks had been erected across 20 states, and American tourists in Puerto Vallarta were sheltering in place with shuttered stores and no food. Flights had been grounded by American Airlines, United, and Air Canada.

Mexico is calm?!

I have spent 25 years helping leaders communicate through crisis. The single fastest way to lose public trust isn’t the crisis itself. It’s saying something that contradicts what people can see with their own eyes.

Tourists were posting videos of smoke over Puerto Vallarta in real time. Their president was saying everything was fine. What the world heard was: you cannot believe a word this government says.

And this matters far beyond that week. Guadalajara — where armed cartel members had stormed the international airport — is scheduled to host World Cup matches. Playoff games were one month away when this happened. FIFA was watching. Every tourism board, hotel chain, and airline with Mexican routes was watching — not what the government did militarily, but what they said, and whether any of it matched reality.

Mexico had a choice. They could have acknowledged the severity, owned the response, and let the world see them taking it seriously. That story ends with an honest picture of a government dealing with a genuine security crisis. Instead they chose reassurance that no one found reassuring.

The crisis didn’t destroy Mexico’s credibility. The response did. Tell people everything is fine while their phones show them it isn’t, and you don’t get a second chance to be believed.

Mexican military forces killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes — El Mencho — the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The retaliatory response from the CJNG was immediate and devastating: coordinated attacks across multiple states, burning vehicles blocking highways, gunmen storming Guadalajara International Airport, flights cancelled by three major airlines, and U.S. shelter-in-place orders issued across five Mexican states.

Here’s something most people don’t understand about crisis communications: you don’t have to be the story to be destroyed by it.

Every resort in Mexico that had nothing to do with that day’s events inherited a reputation problem. Every tour operator, hotel property, and destination marketing organization that had spent years building an image of safety and welcome woke up to a different reality. Not because of anything they did. Because of geography and timing.

Social media was simultaneously flooded with unverified claims that American tourists were being held hostage. No credible news source had confirmed it. It may have been true. It may have been wildly exaggerated. Here’s the thing: it didn’t matter. The confirmed facts alone — an armed cartel presence at a major international airport, flights grounded, Americans told to shelter — were devastating enough for booking decisions. Add unverified hostage claims on top? That’s the headline that cancels honeymoons, reroutes cruise ships, and moves corporate retreats to the Caribbean for two years.

Fear doesn’t wait for fact-checkers. A country that has worked hard to position itself as a safe, welcoming destination had that narrative shattered in a single morning. Rebuilding it takes far longer than restoring order on the highways.

If your reputation can be damaged by proximity to someone else’s crisis, you need a communications strategy that’s ready before the story breaks.

A few years ago I was working a complex crisis at a Toronto venue. Multiple parties, multiple moving issues — one of those situations where everyone has a finger in the pie. One of the other parties had brought in a well-known firm. Smart people. Good reputation. But the consultant they actually sent was junior. A few years of experience, maybe.

They weren’t stupid. They were sharp. Polished. Confident. Confidence isn’t the same as pattern recognition.

When you’ve lived through enough crises, you start seeing three moves ahead. You hear a client say one thing and you immediately know what’s about to become a problem before it gets there. I’d love to tell you it’s because I’m particularly smart. It’s because I have scar tissue. You can’t buy scar tissue. You accumulate it by being wrong, by watching things go sideways, by calling it right and calling it wrong enough times that the patterns become automatic.

This consultant was smart and confident but didn’t have it yet. Things kept stalling. Moves were being made without understanding the ripple effects, and nobody on their team was catching it.

Eventually the client quietly flagged it. The firm’s managing director showed up, assessed the situation, and made a handful of strategic adjustments in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes. That’s all it took once the right person was in the room.

A firm that sells you the senior partner and then hands you to someone with three years of experience isn’t saving you money. They’re gambling with your crisis using someone who hasn’t lost yet.

When you’re hiring for crisis support, ask one question before you sign anything: who exactly picks up the phone when it all goes sideways at 11pm? If the answer is anyone other than the person sitting across from you right now, keep looking.