NEWS TRAVEL WEEKLY BUSINESS CONTINUED FROM THE BACK
Hilton and MSC Cruises. The UK Border Agency, Heathrow and British Airways will also participate. Guevara insisted: “99.9%
of travellers are considered low-risk. A seamless travel journey offers an opportunity for growth despite capacity issues. There is an opportunity to transform the way we travel.” But she said: “It needs a harmonised approach. There is still a lot of work to be done.” Isabel Hill, director of the National Travel and Tourism ffice at the S Department of Commerce, said the US is in an advanced stage of testing biometric security.
She said: “This is succeeding as a security programme and as a facial-recognition programme. “Machines read faces in some cases better than staff. We can board a 400-seat plane in about 22 minutes. It is very exciting.” Hill said the system had a
97% success rate in the trials. “It is primarily about security
but not just counterterrorism. We are looking at criminal activity, at intellectual theft, at pandemics as well,” she said. Matthew Finn, managing
director of security consultancy Augmentiq, agreed biometric facial recognition “is absolutely the way to go”. But he told the summit: “There are challenges and they are significant. Data is easy to optimise and automate. The technology is there – how to do it is the hard part. “There is a lot of talk about collaboration but not a lot of people are collaborating. Privacy is a very important concern, so is political will and appetite.” The WTTC biometric trials
will be conducted in the first half of next year, encompassing booking, airline check-in, border management and boarding as well as hotel, car hire and cruise check-in.
ITCMS 2018: Global industry leaders draw lessons on crisis response
Make sure your crisis team has depth – Vegas expert
Crisis management teams need “depth” because a crisis may erupt when key team members are absent, a senior member of the Las Vegas response team told the International Travel Crisis Management Summit (ITCMS) in London.
Las Vegas was the scene of a mass shooting at a music festival last October when 58 people were murdered and hundreds injured. Cathy Tull, chief marketing
officer of the as egas Convention Centre, told the summit: “When bad things happen, all good plans go out the window. We assembled a team that was not the usual suspects. The people supposed to be there were not available, so the first thing you need is to have depth in your team.” Tull said: “The first thing we did
was to pull down all our media messages – it was not appropriate to be saying ‘Come to Las Vegas’.” This was while the shooting was happening and it was unclear even how many shooters there were. She said: “You have to say something. Remaining silent is not an option.”
Avoid ‘too smooth’ communication, advises SA chief
Professional media advisers can be “too smooth” in communicating during a crisis, according to South African Tourism chief executive Sisa Ntshona. He told the summit how Cape
Town had responded to a drought which threatened to paralyse the city early this year. Ntshona said: “Cape Town had
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travelweekly.co.uk15 November 2018
SISA NTSHONA: ‘A too smooth message just feels like a tagline’
a three-year drought. It was not unique to Cape Town. Sydney had one, but we had a politician who went on TV and said ‘We have a crisis. Day Zero is upon us.”
58
People killed in 2017 Vegas festival shooting
After the shooting, the response
team spent two weeks “having conversations with people”. Tull noted: “People were posting content [on social media] on their own, so we created a spot using all user-generated content. It allowed our fans to support the brand.” She added: “We have great
partnerships [and] people immediately called and asked, ‘How can we help?’ We had $3 million in media donated.” Tull said international visitation
“remained strong”, but in the domestic “drive market” from California “people said they would come at a more appropriate time”. Las Vegas issued a public invitation “to come back” featuring Lionel Richie and Ricky Martin. She said: “Terror can happen
anywhere. Reach out to the community, let people know you are communicating for them, ensure there is a system in place and put it into action.”
While city authorities focused
on attempts to cut water consumption in the city, he said: “e tried first to get water engineers to communicate. People could not understand what they were saying. Then we got media advisors in. But when the message is too smooth it feels like just another tagline.” Instead, Ntshona said the city decided: “The issues of climate change are not unique to South Africa. We said to tourists ‘Don’t stay away, become part of the solution by coming and acting like a local’.”
CATHY TULL: ‘When bad things happen, all good plans go out the window’
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