There is a specific kind of silence that follows a disaster in a destination. The wildfire contained. The hurricane past. The news trucks gone. And then, the next morning, the visitors don’t come — and the DMO finds out its crisis communications plan was a Google Doc someone drafted in 2019 that no one has opened since.

This happens in destination marketing every year. Maui. Lahaina. Asheville. The pattern is always the same: a sector built on inspiration copy suddenly has to manage a fact-driven, high-stakes, multi-stakeholder information crisis in real time. And the organizations that handle it well are not the ones with the best communicators. They are the ones with a plan built before the crisis, rehearsed quarterly, and owned by a named operator.

The industry has had enough of these moments in the last five years that the playbook is no longer optional.

Why DMOs Keep Getting Caught Flat-Footed

Three structural gaps show up across nearly every post-crisis debrief. The first is information lag — the DMO is often the last to know the real operating status of hotels, attractions, airports, and road networks, because the organization’s daily contact loop is with partners who are also scrambling. Without a pre-built stakeholder phone tree and a 30-minute standup schedule, information gets to press before it gets to the marketing team. U.S. Travel Association has documented this lag pattern in multiple crisis reviews.

The second is messaging whiplash. In the first 24 hours, the DMO’s instinct is to go quiet — don’t look tone-deaf, don’t push tourism while people are hurting. Then at day three, the destination is suddenly desperate to signal “we’re open,” and the message lands as either premature or pleading, depending on the framing. Without a staged messaging matrix — what you say at hour 24, day three, week two, month one — the DMO ends up reacting to what competitors and critics say first.

The third gap is ownership. In most DMOs, no one person is clearly accountable for crisis communications. It lives somewhere between the CEO, the comms director, and the agency. When the moment arrives, the question of who has decision authority becomes the single biggest bottleneck in the response.

What a Real Playbook Actually Contains

A usable crisis communications playbook is not a 60-page binder. It is a short, operational document any senior staffer can pick up at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. It should define crisis tiers — what counts as a local incident versus a destination-wide crisis — and the communications posture for each. It should name a single decision-maker per tier and a documented backup. It should include pre-drafted, template-ready language for the first 24 hours across owned channels, with blanks for event-specific detail.

It should also include a stakeholder activation tree: exactly who in the partner ecosystem gets called in what order, with current contact information checked twice a year. Destinations International has published frameworks for destination stewardship and resilience that many DMOs can adapt rather than build from scratch — the infrastructure exists in the industry. The issue is that most organizations have not operationalized it.

And critically, the playbook should include a recovery-phase plan: how to transition from acute crisis to cautious re-promotion, how to coordinate with regional partners on unified messaging, and how to handle earned media inquiries in the weeks after news attention fades but the visitor economy is still in recovery.

The Quarterly Drill

A playbook that lives only in a drive is not a playbook. It is a liability. The DMOs that handle crises well run a quarterly tabletop exercise — 90 minutes, scenario-based, with the full senior team and one or two key partners. The goal is not to memorize the document. It is to surface the questions the document doesn’t answer before the real event does.

Tabletops also reveal the broken contact info, the outdated template language, and the decision rights that were never actually confirmed. FEMA publishes free tabletop exercise templates that can be adapted to destination-specific scenarios. Four tabletops a year — one each quarter, rotating through wildfire, weather event, public health event, and attraction-level incident — costs almost nothing and changes outcomes dramatically when a real event hits.

What the Board Should Hear

Boards tend to treat crisis planning as an operations concern, not a marketing one. That’s a mistake. A destination’s visitor economy recovers at the speed of its communications — not the speed of its cleanup. A DMO that can credibly shape the narrative in the first 72 hours after an event protects the next twelve months of tax base. One that cannot loses visitation for entire seasons and sometimes years.

The ask at the next board meeting is small and concrete: a named crisis communications owner, a playbook refresh on an annual cadence, and four tabletop exercises booked into the calendar. That is the foundation. The rest gets built on it. Build it before the fire — not after.

Photo by Tyler Rutherford on Unsplash