Page 147 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

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1 128 Crisis Communication

Town, from London to Tokyo, showing inundated areas, aban-
doned houses, farms and enterprises and people loading their
belongings into vehicles and trailers.
This is when this crisis really began. The media attention paid
to the floods ‘helped’ create an image of a whole country
covered by water, ignoring the fact that only a relatively small
area was inundated or was at risk. Most of The Netherlands,
including the main tourist attractions, were accessible without
any problem.
Tourists cancelling bookings
The telephones started ringing in the foreign offices of the
Netherlands Board of Tourism (NBT), in Milan, New York, Los
Angeles and Tokyo, to mention just a few. People intending to
visit The Netherlands started asking themselves if the journey
would still be worthwhile, or if the Low Countries could only be
visited by boat. What about the tulip fields, the Rijksmuseum and
Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the Van Gogh Museum and its sun-
flowers, or the windmills at Kinderdijk? Could they be reached?
What if the levees collapsed? The picture the foreign media
painted was an alarming one, showing people escaping their
homes and police forces patrolling ghost villages. Those
watching the television news saw the country through the zoom
lens of the camera, no more than that.
The effect was that people who did not know the country that
well got the wrong picture. They started cancelling bookings,
based only on the news and pictures they saw in the media. The
information and press officers of the NBT’s foreign offices did
not appreciate the real situation in their home country, fed as
they were by the same media. What they did understand was
that tourists deciding to cancel their booking or not to book at all
for trips to Amsterdam and the tourism highlights of The
Netherlands were a real threat to the Dutch tourism industry. The
country depends on tourism: 45,000 mainly small and medium-
sized businesses employ 280,000 people in the industry. Tourist
income at that time was worth r4 billion for the Dutch economy.
Nowadays it is worth r8.3 billion.
The NBT offices abroad had to fight the power of the zoom
lens with unequal resources, trying to tell customers the truth and
to get across the real message about the floods. They needed
objective information to present the right perspective. For
instance: the flower fields bloom between March and May,