You can learn a lot about a company from how they respond to a crisis. It is at these times that a company is put under a lot of stress and has the chance of buckling. How they manage that stress and how they treat their stakeholders can maintain a company’s image or completely ruin it. Think back to the huge BP oil spill in the Gulf. In order to even maintain their business after such a damaging event, they had to prove that they were willing to do anything for the people of the Gulf Coast. However, there are still customers who would rather pay more and drive until they find a different gas station.
Carnival is no exception to crisis management and it was put to the test on November 8th, 2010. The Carnival Splendor’s engine caught fire and left the ship (with about 4000 passengers and crew) stranded in the Pacific Ocean with no electricity, toilets or hot food for three days. This may have been the only cruise where passengers disembarked having lost weight. Eventually it was pulled to land by 6 tugboats and was escorted by US Coast Guard cutters. This was undoubtedly a crisis situation for Carnival, and they handled it with ease, both onboard and on land.
The Carnival land offices contacted government officials and the stranded ship received assistance from both the US Navy (who brought supplies to the ship) and well as the US Coast Guard. They also sent out press releases updating the media on the situation and continued to do so once the ship made it to land and needed to be repaired. It was the land office that was responsible regularly for updating stakeholders that were not onboard.
Meanwhile onboard, as soon as “Alpha Team” (the emergency code for the Fire Squad) was called, all of the senior officers jumped into action. They took a few moments to assess the situation (thick smoke that was hard to see through in the engine room), and the senior officers began calmly alerting passengers and staff of what to do. Updating them every 5 minutes, onboard the guests were constantly kept up to date with whatever information the officers had to offer.
After the ship returned to land when guests were able to communicate with their families and media (of course), Carnival was put under fire (no pun indented) for not mentioning “fire” when the passengers were first told to move to open decks. As John Heald points out in his blog, “at this point I had not used the ‘F’ word because the reports from the engine room were that all the teams could see was thick white smoke……no flames…… just thick white smoke. And those words had been repeated to me by the captain when he had me make announcements. He used the word ‘smoke’ not ‘fire’ and so those were the words I had repeated to the guests.” As it was made clear in class, it is important to always state the truth. If he had said fire and it was simply smoke, he would unnecessarily caused panic with the guests and would have “lied” then too. By telling the passengers that it was smoke in the room, he stuck to one of the cardinal rules in crisis communication, tell the truth.
It is also important to express concern for the victims and to make them one of the top priorities. After all, if your company has not customers, it is pointless. While onboard, Carnival offered an open bar to its guests as they were stuck at sea. But of course, this is not enough to compensate for what they had been through and only a small part of damage control. Carnival’s CEO and President at the time, Gerry Cahill, said in a statement, “The safety and comfort of our guests is our top priority, and we are doing everything we can to allow them to return home as quickly as possible. We know we've ruined their vacations, so we thought the best thing to do was to give (passengers) their money back, make them whole, then give them their vacation back with credit for a free future cruise.” Such a reimbursement is extremely rare in the travel industry but Cahill wanted them to know, “we sincerely apologize to our guests for this unfortunate situation and offer our thanks for their patience and cooperation during this challenging time."
I don’t think that Carnival could have handled this situation better. They remained calm, provided restitution quickly, supplied publics with information, and most importantly, they made sure that those onboard were kept safe and informed. One of Carnival’s strengths in this crisis was that they used multiple channels to communicate. As I have mentioned before, John Heald is an amazing blog writer. He knows precisely how to word his entries to keep them informative as well as entertaining. Carnival lucked out that he was the cruise director on the Splendor while it was stuck at sea. His follow up entries gave extreme detail of the events and hopefully calmed some fear in those that were traveling shortly there after. I am sure that many may have been a little concerned to book a cruise right after this happened, but I believe that it shows that their staff is trained, and their ships are equipped to deal with these types of events.
If you have time, I recommend that you take a look at John Heald’s Blog as he gives a first hand account of what life was like on the Splendor while it was stuck out at sea. It is a very captivating and well-written blog. The blog also takes time to address all of the rumors and let’s people know what Carnival was doing for its guests that were onboard. Oh and if you hadn't guessed, it is a remarkable story.
