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An 11-year-old slipped off a zipline at an indoor adventure park in Scarborough. He’s okay — some bruising, nothing long-term. That’s the good news. What the company did next is not good news.

Here was their opportunity. Lead with empathy. Acknowledge the incident with genuine concern. Emphasize that safety is not a checkbox but a commitment. Assure other parents that this specific situation is being thoroughly reviewed. None of that is complicated.

Here’s what they actually said: ‘We are aware of the incident and it is currently under review with our insurers and legal counsel. Given that this involves a minor, we are not providing interviews or comments at this time.’

Under review with their insurers and legal counsel. Not ‘under review to make sure a situation like this never happens again.’ Under review with their insurers. If I were cynical — and I’m becoming so — I’d almost say this statement was written to guarantee a lawsuit. Congratulations to whoever drafted it.

And they didn’t stop there. The family’s belongings were still at the facility when they rushed to the hospital. Nobody from the company contacted them. Not to check on the child. Not to offer an apology. Not to acknowledge a family that had just had the worst day of their year.

This is what happens when lawyers write your public-facing communications and nobody thinks about the human beings on the other end.

The fix here was so simple. Call the family. Acknowledge what happened with genuine regret. Talk about safety, not insurance. Be a business that demonstrates it cares about the children who come through its doors.

Instead, they demonstrated the opposite.

True story: I was working with a client earlier this year, and they said ‘We have a plan in our crisis manual.’ When they found it, it was written in 2014. My soul broke a little.

In 2014, Twitter was barely a mainstream platform. TikTok didn’t exist. The media landscape has been transformed multiple times since then. The speed at which information — and misinformation — travels has no comparison to where it was ten years ago.

A 2014 crisis manual isn’t just outdated. It’s a false sense of security. It’s the binder on the shelf that makes leadership feel prepared without actually making them prepared. When a real crisis hits, reaching for that document is actively harmful — it consumes precious time, generates false confidence, and almost certainly points to spokespeople, protocols, and platforms that no longer exist or no longer function the way the manual describes.

Here’s the reality of crisis communications in 2025 and beyond: the issue hits social media before your team has finished their morning coffee. The court of public opinion is assembling before you’ve confirmed the basic facts. The story is being written while you’re still deciding whether to say anything.

You don’t need a better binder. You need a trusted third-party advisor who has actually been in the trenches, whose phone number gets answered at 2am, and who can translate chaos into calm — fast. Reputation isn’t protected by paperwork. It’s built and defended in real time by real people who know what reputational risk actually looks like under pressure.

A call beats a manual. Every single time.

Everyone’s Googling Cancún. Fewer people are actually showing up. There’s a lesson in that gap.

Search volume doesn’t pay the bills. What pays the bills is actual trust — the kind that converts a search into a booking.

Cancún is still trending online. But what travelers find after that search is the problem. Instead of images of beaches, they’re finding stories about airport chaos, safety concerns, pushy operators, and review patterns that make them nervous. Meanwhile, nearby destinations like Punta Cana are presenting a cleaner picture: better price points, more organized airports, a reputation that doesn’t require second-guessing.

The market doesn’t reward visibility alone. It rewards trust. And trust is built or destroyed based on what people find when they go looking — not just what you put in front of them.

This applies to any business operating in a reputational ecosystem, not just tourism destinations. You can have excellent marketing and a terrible online presence. You can spend a fortune on advertising and still lose to a competitor who’s slower but more trustworthy. The gap between what you say about yourself and what other people say about you is where reputation actually lives.

For Cancún specifically, the path forward isn’t more advertising. It’s closing that gap. Addressing the actual concerns travelers are raising. Being honest about what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what visitors can genuinely expect. Making the experience match the pitch.

Trust beats visibility. It always has. Marketing gets people curious. Trust gets them on the plane.

Here’s an awkward truth about destinations that struggle with reputation: many of them aren’t losing trust because of what they do to tourists. They’re losing trust because of what they do to their own communities.

When local voices get sidelined — when residents find their commutes ruined, their neighborhoods overrun, and their concerns dismissed in favor of visitor metrics — something shifts. People stop seeing tourism as a win-win. They start seeing it as something being done to them. That resentment eventually surfaces in ways that affect visitors directly: in service attitude, in political backlash, in the kind of ambient hostility that travelers notice without being able to articulate exactly why.

The cruise ship example is familiar to dozens of destinations. Maximum passenger throughput, minimum local benefit, maximum community disruption. The economic argument in favor of those ships turns out to be weaker than the political and social cost of alienating the people who actually live there.

Trust for a destination isn’t built only with visitors. It’s built pothole by pothole, conversation by conversation, with the community that lives alongside the tourism economy year-round.

Ignore that community, and you may eventually find that you’ve been operating without a social license — not legally, but in spirit. And when a real crisis hits, when something genuinely goes wrong and you need the benefit of the doubt from the people around you, you’ll discover that goodwill has been spent.

Listen to your neighbors as closely as you listen to your reviews. Build buy-in at home before you build it with visitors. The two are not in competition — but you have to actively manage both.

Your crisis communications plan might be your biggest liability. That’s a strong claim, so let me back it up.

I’ve seen this happen too many times: a crisis hits, leadership scrambles to find ‘the plan,’ they dust off a binder that hasn’t been touched in years, and then things get worse. A bad crisis plan isn’t just unhelpful. It actively hurts you.

Dated plans reference platforms that no longer function the same way, spokespeople who’ve left the organization, and approval chains that create dangerous delays when speed is everything. You’re moving at a pace determined by a document written in a different media environment.

Overly prescriptive plans lock you into rigid responses that don’t fit the actual situation. Every crisis is different. The plan that works for a data breach doesn’t work for an executive arrest. The plan that works for a product recall doesn’t work for a workplace injury. Templates feel like preparation. In practice, they often produce responses so generic and formulaic that they become the story.

Crises don’t follow scripts. The plan says ‘issue a press release within four hours’ while your customers are already dragging you on social media. The result? Your preparedness becomes the story. ‘Company responds to tragedy with copy-paste statement’ is not the headline you want.

A good crisis plan is a framework — flexible enough to adapt, clear enough to act on, and current enough to reflect how people actually communicate today. It identifies who makes decisions, not what decisions get made. It establishes communication channels, not communication scripts. It gets reviewed annually, not filed and forgotten.

If your plan is collecting dust, it’s not protecting you. It’s a false sense of security — and that is sometimes more dangerous than no plan at all.

You can spend a fortune on PR plans, monitoring software, and crisis manuals. You can still get blindsided by a single moment at the front desk or poolside.

The most underrated form of reputation protection is front-line staff training.

I’ve seen venues with excellent PR teams still land in serious trouble because the teenager at the ticket booth was unprepared when a parent asked a hard question. I’ve seen lifeguards go completely blank when a guest pulled out a phone during an incident. The PR team isn’t there. The crisis manager isn’t there. The person in front of the camera, willing or not, is whoever happened to be working that shift.

When staff know how to respond — not just what to say, but how to think and react — you’re covered from the ground up. The goal isn’t to turn your front-line team into trained spokespersons. It’s to give them enough confidence and enough of a framework that they don’t freeze, don’t say something that makes things worse, and know how to get the right person involved quickly.

Training isn’t just about safety procedures or upselling. It’s about giving the people on the front line the tools to handle the weird, wild moments that no crisis manual ever covers. The guest who gets belligerent. The parent who demands answers you don’t have. The situation that feels manageable until someone starts filming.

If your organization isn’t making front-line scenario training a cornerstone of its reputation strategy, you’re not betting on your PR team. You’re betting on whoever happens to be working the day something goes wrong.

Communicating in a crisis can feel paralyzing, but the formula for the first three hours is simpler than most people think.

Three elements. That’s it.

First, acknowledge what you know. Be specific. Who was involved, what happened, when and where. Get the basic facts out. Not everything — just what you can confirm. ‘Two patrons were involved in an altercation at our facility. Police and emergency services have responded.’ That’s a sentence. That’s enough to start.

Second, acknowledge what you don’t know. This sounds counterintuitive. Leaders often think that admitting gaps in their information makes them look weak. It does the opposite. When you proactively address the questions you haven’t answered yet, you show you’re thinking ahead. You demonstrate that you understand what people need to know, even if you can’t yet deliver it. ‘We’ve pledged our full cooperation with authorities as they investigate. Among the things we hope to have answered: how this happened and what we could have done to prevent it.’

Third, tell people where to find more information. Even if it’s as simple as ‘we’ll update this page at 10pm.’ Give people somewhere to go. Give them a reason not to fill the vacuum with speculation.

That’s the whole formula. You don’t need perfect information. You need to show people you’re awake, you care, and you’re actually in control. In a high-stakes world, fast and honest beats slow and polished every time.

Wait too long and everyone writes their own version of the story. And you won’t like what they come up with.

One person is dead. Eleven workers remain unaccounted for. An explosion has just occurred at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Plant, and the company’s first public statement has arrived.

Here’s what they said: ‘Around 11 a.m. ET on Monday, August 11, an incident occurred at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Plant, specifically at coke oven batteries 13 and 14. Emergency teams were immediately dispatched to the scene.’ And from the CEO: ‘Our top priority is the safety and wellbeing of our employees and the environment.’

Every single word of that statement was wrong.

‘An incident occurred.’ An explosion happened. Own the word. When you use passive language to describe a catastrophic event, you signal that you’re trying to put distance between your organization and what happened. People notice.

‘Emergency teams were immediately dispatched.’ Our teams arrived within minutes. Who dispatched them? From where? Active voice puts a human being in charge. Passive voice puts nobody in charge.

‘Our top priority is the safety and wellbeing of our employees.’ When people are dead and missing, saying safety is your priority rings hollow. Don’t declare priorities. Show them.

Here’s what a statement with real humanity sounds like: ‘At approximately 11 this morning, an explosion occurred at our Clairton Plant. One of our people has died. Eleven remain unaccounted for. Our teams were on site within minutes. If you have a family member who works at Clairton, call this number.’ That’s not a legal document. That’s a human being talking.

The first 24 hours of crisis response determines public perception for the next 24 months. Corporate speak doesn’t protect you. It distances you from the people who need to trust you most.

Two executives at Astronomer got caught at a Coldplay concert being with people who were very specifically not their spouses. The company’s early crisis communications response — a period of silence followed by something that wasn’t quite a statement — wasn’t great. Then they hired Gwyneth Paltrow as a spokesperson.

My take: brilliant.

Let me explain, because a lot of people called it sheer stupidity. No one was physically injured here. No data was stolen. No one was defrauded. Two executives made bad personal choices and got caught on camera in a public place. The company itself did nothing wrong as a company.

In that context, what key message does Astronomer actually have? The sincere ‘woe is us, we’re going to learn from this’ approach would be transparent and obviously manufactured. The company didn’t do anything wrong. Two individuals made choices that belong in a divorce proceeding, not a corporate communications crisis.

Gwyneth Paltrow — ex-wife of Chris Martin, the Coldplay frontman — signals something important: we see the absurdity of this situation. We are not pretending it isn’t absurd. We have enough self-awareness to acknowledge that the world is watching something slightly ridiculous happen, and we’re participating in that reality rather than trying to solemnly declare it a tragedy.

Crisis humor has rules. It never works when people are dead, when genuine harm has been done, or when the crisis involves the organization’s core conduct. It can work when the situation is embarrassing but not harmful, when the company itself isn’t culpable, and when the humor reads as self-aware rather than dismissive.

Astronomer cleared all three bars. I’d have added one tongue-in-cheek line about conscious uncoupling, but that’s a stylistic note.

After an Air India plane crash, the CEO essentially lifted his condolence speech from someone else’s publicly available remarks after a different airline disaster. Word for word.

I have no words. Which is ironic, since that is precisely the problem.

Setting aside the ethical dimension of plagiarism — which is considerable — think about what this tells us about Air India’s state of preparedness. A major international airline, flying hundreds of thousands of passengers, had not prepared their own language for one of the most foreseeable crises in their industry. A plane crash is an aviation company’s worst possible day. It is, by definition, the day for which they should be most prepared, both operationally and communicatively.

Instead, the CEO went looking for words somewhere else.

Nothing communicates ‘we don’t actually care about what happened’ more efficiently than stealing someone else’s grief. The people affected by this crash — families, friends, colleagues — deserved language that was written for them, specific to their loss, from a leader who had thought about what to say and meant it.

Authentic crisis communications doesn’t require eloquence. It requires honesty and specificity. It requires you to acknowledge this situation, these people, this moment. A statement that could have been delivered after any airline crash by any airline CEO is, by definition, not doing that.

The lesson is straightforward: if you operate in a world where tragedy is a genuine possibility, spend the time now — in peacetime — building the language, the frameworks, and the muscle memory you’ll need when the worst day comes. Don’t wait until you’re reaching for someone else’s words.