Crisis Management and Boston

This past Monday’s tragic events at the Boston Marathon is a teachable moment for a host of classes. I covered crisis management in my lodging class just last week. I show the video Hotel Ground Zero, handout a case study on the recovery of the tourism and hospitality industry in Washington, DC that was conducted by Georgetown University, after 9/11 and then, incorporate one aspect in their final assignment.  This assignment is constructing a job description and inserting five strategies that individual will be responsible in case of an emergency.

I wish I could do more in the limited time.  I have less than a week to educate the students to this important topic as I could spend a whole semester or more on the dynamic nature.  Since Tuesday morning was the first moment after the attack and we were discussing Event Planning, I was able to incorporate it into my Introduction class.  I showed the video again and then some video about the events.  Today, we discussed about event planning, the role and responsibility of event planners–typical intro information and then got intricate with the events happening around us.  My biggest question to them was how will our industry change  now?  How will this niche of the industry change?  How will event planners have to change to accommodate this incident.  Needless to say, we had a great discussion.

So the mind map is in its initial form from our discussion.  Now to do a bit of research…