If you manage marketing at a DMO, the most important document in your office is one that almost certainly does not exist yet. It is the playbook that tells the team what to do in the first six hours of a crisis — the wildfire, the active shooter, the storm, the high-profile incident, the viral resident-vs-tourist video, the hotel sale that turns into a federal investigation. The destinations that handle these well share one trait. They wrote the playbook before they needed it.

Crisis communications used to be a side project for the PR person. In 2026, with a 24-hour news cycle that runs on social media and an AI-driven information environment that surfaces destination claims with no editorial filter, it is now a core operational responsibility for any DMO marketing leader. The good news: building a credible playbook is not expensive. It just requires you to do the thinking before the crisis instead of during it.

Why most DMOs underinvest in crisis comms

Three reasons. First, the budget conversation never goes anywhere because there’s no incident to point to. Second, the work is hard to assign — it sits between marketing, partnerships, and emergency management, so it tends to sit nowhere. Third, the playbook only matters when it matters, which means it never quite makes the priority list.

The result is that when a real crisis hits, the bureau is on its back foot. Statements get written by committee. The CEO doesn’t know who is supposed to talk to media. Stakeholders are asking for guidance the bureau can’t give. Reporters get briefed by people who shouldn’t be briefing them. By the time the destination figures out what its position is, the narrative has already been set somewhere else.

Destinations International has been pushing the industry to treat crisis preparation as core destination management work, and most of the major U.S. DMOs that have lived through high-profile incidents will tell you the same thing: the cost of building a playbook in advance is trivial compared to the cost of operating without one for 72 hours.

What the playbook actually needs to cover

This is the practical scope. A working DMO crisis communications playbook should fit in one binder and answer five questions clearly enough that anyone on your team could find the answer at 2 a.m.

1. Who decides we are in a crisis

The single most common breakdown in real incidents is that no one is sure whether the bureau should formally activate the plan. Name the decision-maker (usually the CEO, with the head of communications as backup), and specify the trigger thresholds. Examples: any event that draws national media to the destination, any incident affecting more than 10 visitors, any social-media incident that hits 100k impressions, any public-safety incident on a hotel or attraction property. Triggers should be specific enough that there is no debate when the moment arrives.

2. Who speaks for the destination

The CEO is usually the right voice for major incidents. The head of communications handles operational updates and ongoing media. The marketing director almost never speaks publicly during a live crisis. Identify each role, list backups, and have media-trained spokespeople. U.S. Travel and most state tourism associations offer media-training resources that you should leverage now, not after.

3. What we say in the first 60 minutes

Pre-write five holding statement templates. Natural disaster. Public-safety incident. Health crisis. Reputation incident (resident or visitor behavior gone viral). Infrastructure failure (airport closure, hotel evacuation). Each template should express empathy, defer to public-safety officials on facts, redirect specific operational questions to the appropriate authority, and commit to providing more information as it becomes available. Pre-written language is not lazy — it is what allows your team to respond in an hour instead of six.

4. Who we coordinate with

Map the relationships now. Local emergency management. State tourism office. Police and fire information officers. The largest hotels and attractions in your destination. Major airline communications teams if you have a hub. Every one of those relationships should have a named contact, a phone number, and an established protocol so that when an incident hits you are exchanging information within 30 minutes, not 5 hours.

5. What we shut down

This is the most underrated part of any DMO crisis plan. The minute a serious incident occurs in your destination, you need a one-click way to pause every scheduled email send, every paid social campaign, every promotional post in your queue, and every press push that was about to go out. Failing to do this is how DMOs end up with a tourism ad running over breaking news of an incident in their own city. Build the kill-switch process now and document who has the credentials.

Drilling the playbook is more important than writing it

A playbook that lives in a shared drive is not a playbook. It is a document. The DMOs that handle real crises well drill the plan once or twice a year — usually a tabletop exercise where the leadership team works through a hypothetical scenario in real time and documents what broke. This is where you find out that the CEO doesn’t actually have the after-hours phone number for the head of police communications, that your social-media kill switch requires three logins no one has, and that your number-two spokesperson hasn’t been media-trained in three years.

An hour-long tabletop in Q1 saves you a week of pain in Q3. The cost is staff time. The benefit is real organizational readiness.

The post-crisis recovery plan is the other half

Most DMO crisis plans stop at the incident. The good ones plan for recovery from day one. Build a recovery framework that names the audiences you need to win back (visitors, advisors, meeting planners, residents), the messages you will use with each, the timeline for resuming promotional activity, and the metrics you will track to know whether the destination’s reputation is recovering.

Tools like Zartico and Sojern already make it possible to monitor visitor-intent shifts in near real time after an incident, which means you can build a data-informed recovery curve instead of guessing. If you do not currently have a way to track sentiment, search interest, and booking intent for your destination day-over-day, your recovery plan is operating blind. Fix that before the next crisis, not after.

How to actually get this built

The most common reason a DMO does not have a crisis playbook is that no one was given the project. Assign it. Give one person on the marketing team eight to ten hours over the next month to draft a one-binder version. Walk it through the leadership team. Run a tabletop. Update it annually. None of that requires consultants. None of it requires new budget. It requires the bureau to decide that crisis comms is real work and treat it that way.

The destinations that win the next decade will not be the ones that never have a crisis. They will be the ones whose audience — visitors, residents, stakeholders, partners — came out of a crisis trusting the destination more than they did going in. That trust is built in the first six hours. The playbook is what makes those six hours go well.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash