1st of the Month Bonus Episode: From the Archives - The Six P’s of Disaster Preparedness with Pete DiMaio

Alex Husner  0:00  
Hey guys. We're so excited to be back today for the September 1, first of the month bonus episode. And we wanted to do this as a flashback to an episode that we had in June of 2022 this is episode 36 the six P's of preparing for the disaster zone with peak DiMaio. So

yeah, going into September, we know that is the peak of hurricane season, especially for the Gulf of Mexico, and so where I live, it's near and dear to my heart and to my traumatic memories, of course, but thought it was a good time to just remind people to plan, plan, plan. And Pete lays out a really good plan and a really good strategy for having plans in place so that if a hurricane or any other disaster should come your way, you are prepared. So here is episode 36 re airing for our September 1 of the month.

welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women on vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we are joined today with Pete DiMaio of travel boom marketing to cover a very timely and important topic as we enter hurricane season. And actually, this is Pete's second time on the show, which this makes him the first guest to come back for a second round. So we're excited one that he would even come back the first torture we put him through. Pete joined us for episode 19, if you didn't hear it, which was back in March, and he shared with us the top five things that vacation rentals can learn from hotels. And if you don't already know Pete, besides that, or just know him in general, he is also a fellow podcaster, and a few years ago, he did a podcast on his show, the hotel marketing podcast about how marketers should prepare for a disaster, and the planning guide and communications that need to be put in place ahead of time so that when the disaster strikes, you are prepared. And as saying goes, proper planning prevents piss poor performance. So with that, Pete, welcome back to the show.

Pete DiMaio  2:26  
Thank you so much, and I appreciate you guys inviting me back, not the other way around, because I know that I can take podcasts off the track really easily. So I'm excited about getting back on here for this one. Well,

Annie Holcombe  2:38  
we're really glad to have you, and it's actually very timely that you're coming, Alex, when I we were just at the vrma executive summit in West Palm a couple of weeks ago and got hit with a tropical storm. And funny enough, the Tropical Storm was called Alex. It

Alex Husner  2:53  
came in like a wrecking ball.

Annie Holcombe  2:58  
It did, and we decided we were going to do our own weather report while we were there. And the planet certainly aligned and gave us an opportunity to, as they say, go viral on our social media. So it was a lot of fun. Had a lot of good conversation with people about weather and how that affects our industry. And so having you back here just fell right in good timing.

Alex Husner  3:18  
Hold on. I think we have to tell the story. Your job is good. A lot of our listeners saw the video, and I think it's worth telling the story, because it was one of those kind of crazy things that even happened. But we're about to leave the summit, and we get news alerts that tropical storm Alex has come in, and almost everybody had left the summit, besides Annie and I, we plan to stay for a day, so we're there. And Pete, you probably remember it was during Hurricane Florence. I think that it was somewhere local. I think it was in Wilmington that the guy, I think it was like Jim Cantor, he was on the news, and he was just being extremely dramatic that the wind was blowing and, you know, it was just awful. And the two guys just walked by casually, and I just blew up. And so Annie and I are sitting there, and there's no one left at the event, and we're having a couple glasses of wine. And we said, you know, let's, let's go out there. Let's try and recreate this. So we try, we try to do it. But again, as she said, stars align, our camera wasn't working. And so this couple walked by us, and we asked, you know, can you just help us with this video? And their first comment was, they said, Oh no, no, no, I don't I'm not buying any timeshare. I'm not interested. We're not trying to study timeshare. We just need you to help with this video. So when we showed him what we wanted to do, the guy said, Well, you couldn't have picked the better people. My aunt, the lady he was with, she is a director from Hollywood, and she was, she was on. She was the star of the TV show in the early 2000s black scorpion. Is that right? Yeah, I

Speaker 2  4:46  
think Black Scorpion, yes, yeah. Michelle listell,

Alex Husner  4:50  
if you Google her, she's very beautiful woman. So she got really into this with us. And if you haven't seen the video, you can find it on our if you go over to our YouTube channel, make sure to subscribe while you're. Or two. It's on our LinkedIn. It's everywhere. But we thought we had a kind of a cool idea. She was directing us very seriously in that whole process, and it just kind of went crazy. But meanwhile, there were a couple people from the show that were still there. Anthony Gant from@ease.com he was watching us from afar on the balcony, and said he saw us later. He said I had no ideas that I was on the phone and I was telling somebody, Alex and Annie are down there in the middle of the storm. Absolutely like being crazy with these two random people. So we call, we caused a little bit of a ruckus there for a short amount of time, but it was a lot of fun. Hey, that's what

Pete DiMaio  5:39  
happens when Hurricane Alex comes into town, right?

Annie Holcombe  5:44  
And we did. We did get directed by a Hollywood director, so we're like, semi famous. Now you

Pete DiMaio  5:49  
have to put that on your resume, right?

Alex Husner  5:52  
Absolutely. Yeah, this will be the moments we look back on in time. But, and we had already planned to do this episode with Pete, but when that happened, we're like, this is just too funny. And we gotta make sure that we get Pete scheduled here in June and we get this released. Because, you know, back to all seriousness, we are in hurricane season, and Annie, you've lived through a very, very terrible hurricane, hurricane, Michael, and you've seen the disaster that it causes. So being prepared is key.

Annie Holcombe  6:16  
Yep, absolutely, absolutely. So I think at this point, Pete, you've prepared some kind of points of order and things that we should all be aware of. So I think we just kind of dive right in and see what you have for us. Yeah, yep,

Pete DiMaio  6:29  
yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it earlier. This is definitely very timely. We're coming into hurricane season. Everyone says that hurricane season is either busy or a non event based on if a storm actually hits. But the reality is is every year there's dozens of tropical storms. There's many hurricanes, whether they make landfall or not, is almost irrelevant to a hoteliers perspective, because so much of what's going to actually be the disaster is going to be the communications. It's going to be the news cycle. It's going to be all the things that kind of go along with along with the storm, and I hate to say the theatrics of a hurricane, but you were talking about before how, you know Jim kentore will, you know, lean in on a storm and people are just walking behind him. You have to account for that type of thing. And what this my article here, which is disaster planning communications guide for hotels is not so much about on the operation side. The assumption is your hotel or your vacation rental program all has the operation side pretty much nailed down. This is more about the communication side, in the marketing side, and what you need to be doing as a hotelier or a vacation rental manager to make sure you're getting out in front of the potential disaster. And first and foremost, you are helping and you're being a conduit for information. You're being a conduit for truthful information, and are able to be a servant to people in a in a really difficult time of need, potentially. So that's kind of where this article all kind of stems from. And Alex, you mentioned it, it's all based on the six P's, which is proper planning prevents piss poor performance. If you don't put the time in in advance, you are going to be one of the many people who might be displaced or trying to play catch up. If you take some time now, put it in place, regardless of if that disaster is a hurricane in the times we're talking about now, an earthquake, a fire, whatever it might be, as long as you have this plan, it's very easy in time of a disaster to open up your notebook and tailor your plan for the specific event that you're dealing with at the moment,

Alex Husner  8:37  
right? Yeah, and it's always a fluid situation, so there's some things that are that are going to have to be changed on the fly, you know, depending on what is going on at the time. But, you know, in our area, Pete, we've had really unique set of storms. We I think we had six or seven years there straight where we either had a hurricane or a major flood or water event that it was really, we haven't been hit by a hurricane here badly, but it was all the flooding that was the major issue for our destination, which was pretty unique, because we were here, nothing was wrong, but nobody could get to us, and we were essentially on an island that very last year. So there's a lot of different things that have to be put into place, but getting this plan ahead of time, it'll save you a lot of headache, and it'll make things much more efficient for your company, your guests and your homeowners, yep.

Pete DiMaio  9:24  
And, you know, I think one thing to kind of make a note of as well is, you know, as we're building out this plan, understand that people, they kind of suck at. Geography is the best way to say it.

Annie Holcombe  9:34  
Fair point

Alex Husner  9:35  
all of North and South Carolina, right? Well.

Pete DiMaio  9:40  
And the funny thing is, is that many times I think it was, it was Florence, or one of the ones I hit recently where we had a ton of flooding, yeah, people would say, oh, you know, I saw that Myrtle Beach got hit really hard. How was the rest of Florida? We're actually, you know, several 100

Unknown Speaker  9:57  
miles from Florida. We're

Pete DiMaio  9:58  
fine. So the. It's very important to understand that the customer that you're talking to and your audience, yeah, may need to get back, take a step back, and really go over where you're located at and, like I said, be that servant to help educate that your guests or potential guests, yeah, absolutely.

Annie Holcombe  10:15  
And one thing I wanted to just throw in there, one thing that I've experienced, and it's relevant to, like any disaster, and I think we've seen it a lot, just in general, is the fake news that gets out there. And so again, you know the social media aspect of it, the conversations that people have, and people, again, they don't know geography, so what they might have seen something that could have happened, literally, in Italy, but they're thinking it happened here, because they just see it in the news. And they just, like, they grasp on to, like a little tidbit of the story. So, I mean, again, it's very important, all of them we're going to talk about today, about being concise and and having that message drafted before anything does strike. I'm

Alex Husner  10:51  
pretty sure everybody at the Palm Coast of Florida thought the Tropical Storm Alex was the biggest storm that's rolled through,

Annie Holcombe  10:57  
pretty much all right.

Pete DiMaio  11:02  
Well, cool. Well, so, so, I think the first thing to say is, during a disaster, I think this is the very salient point. Is, during a disaster, it is not your job to sell rooms or to capitalize on the event, right? That is, this is not the right time to be doing that. Yeah, your plan is really to be a true servant. You know, when you think of a true hotelier, it's someone who's bending over backwards to help their guests and community, and that is really what we want to do, you know, if something like this is coming. And so what we did is we kind of broke out, say, kind of building on the whole six. PS, we have six bullet points of things that a hotelier should focus on when they're building out that disaster communications plan. And we'll kind of go through these all briefly, but the first one is your on site content, followed by your email communications. And that email communications is also other communications to your guest phone, whatever it might be, your social channels, your PR your pay per click and meta management and things that you're spending money for, that you might need to pause and then lastly, but probably I'll almost put this at the beginning, your guest and your community assistance, what you're doing to actually help be a solution and not be someone who's part of the problem. Yep,

Alex Husner  12:13  
great. All great points. So on site content? What type of on site content should vacation rental managers and marketers be thinking about in this time. I would say

Pete DiMaio  12:23  
the first thing to think about is, where are you in relation geographically to this event? Are you inside the disaster zone? Are you outside the disaster zone? If you're inside of it, your communications plan is gonna be a lot different than those on the outside. And for all of the things that we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna look at it from both directions. On the inside versus outside. Let's really kind of focus on inside the disaster zone for now, outside is going to be more about just helping, helping, helping the people in trouble. But if you're inside the disaster zone, the very first thing you want to do is make sure that you've updated your site to be specific to the event. So if you have if you can set homepage alerts, if you can have current conditions in your locations, if you have a webcam, those are phenomenal tools that you can put front and center on your website so that people can see kind of what's happening in your area. Again, the job here is not to be selling rooms. If it's a hurricane, don't do that. Nobody wants to come visit your property in a hurricane, right? But what they're coming for is information, and that's something that luckily you're in the right place where you can share that great information. So put it together in advance. Get the templates ready, so that if something does happen, you can be that person who's providing great content on your site that's going to help everybody.

Alex Husner  13:45  
Yeah, I think without knowing what the actual situation will be ahead of time, just, you know, simple things like on our site, we have a banner that goes at the very top of the website that that can be deployed immediately if we need to. We have a templated page that we've used in past storms. So I can just update with information, but I mean, really, what you want to do is you want to make sure that your guests, if they come to your site and they can get the information they need there, that cuts down on the time that's going to take your team to handle phone calls, emails, social media. I mean, people are going to be coming at you in every different direction, but the more information you can give at the primary hub of where they're going to go, the better that's going to start the scene.

Pete DiMaio  14:24  
Yeah, in that disaster plan, when you open up that notebook and you review the content, this is, like you said, Alex, this is all the content you can write in advance. You know the position of, let's say it's a hurricane. You know what people are doing on the scene, where disaster response and assistance can come from, have all that written out because, like you said, media is going to be reaching out to you. You're going to have to focus on operational issues. If you can plan in advance and offload all of that kind of creative thinking of how you can help in advance, then it makes life so much easier for you. It makes you more calm. Um, in a time of very high stress, and I think

Annie Holcombe  15:01  
one thing that's really important to kind of looking at it from the vacation rental perspective, is you also need to make sure that you have someone who can handle the owner conversations and the owner messaging. That's really important, because obviously you're not only trying to look out for the safety of the guests and the people who have been here are here, and you're trying to get them out and obviously your staff, but you're also trying to protect someone's big investment, so you have to make sure that you have a plan for that communication. And I know, in my experience, several companies once a storm was kind of we were in the cone, you know, that cone of possibility we would start communicating with owners e blast going out on a regular basis, and then have conversations with board presidents, like have conference calls with them. And so I think, again, that's just another strategy that people need to be mindful of, that you know, you're, it's, it's the guest, absolutely, it's your community, absolutely. But you have all these, these owners and investors that are part of your company that have a different message and a different worry,

Alex Husner  15:59  
and yeah, and that depending on the time of year of when this hits. I mean, in the off season, we're probably not super full at that point, right? The owners reaching out that we get as many, if not more, communications from them, asking questions as we do from people that are here staying so the number one thing we tell them, we're taking everything off your balcony, don't worry, and we're putting it in the condo. This is a fluid situation. We're going to keep you updated, but just just at least starting it so that they know you are going to keep them updated, start that process, so that they're not having to reach out to you, and then they get frustrated because you're not able to respond. I think

Annie Holcombe  16:34  
a lot of a lot of our you know, listeners, are people that don't necessarily have on site management. They are, you know, they have a unit in a building, so, so you need to make sure that you have a plan again beforehand of who's that point of contact at each one of those buildings, whether it be the on site manager or the HOA. You know this, that's just another component to keep in mind. And

Pete DiMaio  16:57  
I think what you bring up a good point is proactively reaching out to in case of vacation rental, you have multiple people who are interested concerned. You have your owners, but you also have your visitors. And when you think about the amount of stress that you have to go through before you say, You know what I'm gonna have to call somebody you know that builds up for a while, and that person's already getting frustrated, getting annoyed, getting concerned and scared. Yeah, if you can reach out to them before they even know that a storm is out there, potentially say, hey, just so you know this is out there, this is what we're doing to resolve the issue. So many times, people's concern and fear comes from not knowing, not knowing, yeah, and if you can address that in advance, absolutely, not only are you setting a better precedent for your guests, you're creating a situation where a homeowner would be crazy to use another vacation rental company because you took such good care of them when

Alex Husner  17:50  
they needed it. And that's that's a really good point, driving home the local influence that you have and ability to serve your homeowners. I think that's a great point. Yep,

Pete DiMaio  17:58  
if I have that content on the site in advance, you're already farther ahead, so you can start doing those things and reach out. So that kind of brings us so once you have the content on the website, now you need to start telling people about it, and that's where, you know, I have it called email communications in my article, but that's however you decide to communicate with the guests. It could be text, it could be email, it could be a physical phone call, but make sure that, and we just talked about this, you're being proactive, and you're pushing this information out. If I'm a property owner or I'm a guest, you cannot send me too much information, right? Yeah, about a massive investment, if it's a vacation investment, or if it's a, yeah, actual real property investment, right?

Alex Husner  18:42  
Yeah. Anyway you think about, I mean, your your click through rates and conversion around conversion, but just engagement on emails, you know, during stay, leading up to somebody's stay, those get substantially more than a regular email marketing, you know, type campaign. So it's the same thing in this situation. The more you tell people, the better they're going to read all of it. I mean, everybody feels like a sponge in these situations, because we just want to make sure we know everything we possibly can. A lot of that content, you can be repurposing from other local sources, so your chamber of commerce, or the weather service or, I mean, there's different news outlets like a lot of it, you can just be repurposing from your local sources. And

Pete DiMaio  19:17  
that is completely true. Your job as a marketer is not to be the sole source of the content. Your job is to be the conduit of the content that's out there, you know. So if you know, in our case, we have a you know, weather forecaster, Ed Piotrowski, who's like the guy as it relates to hurricanes in our area. Far be it from us to, you know, make recommendations or forecast just reposting his information or sending out one email that has helpful links for all this information that we'd recommend? Yeah, you can go so far.

Annie Holcombe  19:50  
Yeah, and I think also too in past, again, we've linked over to the EOC and EOCs in any community the Emergency Operations Center. I think, is what they call it. You know, they have updates when things are happening, and they will generally meet every three hours based on if they're out there flying around in a hurricane, to get updates. But they're going to post updates too. And so you can, if you can, have links on your site to trusted media sources that you know that those backs and those updates are going to get updated timely again, like your local weather guy, he's, you know, he's the guy you go to, link off to that weather station, link the Emergency Operations Center, link to the National Hurricane Center, like, you know, or, again, whatever disaster entity is, is kind of overseeing the the community preparations for it. Yeah,

Pete DiMaio  20:32  
yep. And then one thing I'd also add to this is that's we're talking about things are inside the disaster zone. If you're outside the disaster zone, you're going to be very tempted to say, oh, people can't visit this location. I'm going to give them an opportunity to visit my location. Don't do that. That is, yeah, that is being opportunistic. And that is the exact opposite that you want to do, instead of trying to be the person who's optimistic and get as many bookings as she can. How about just roll up your sleeves and say, Hey, here's what our hotels or property is doing to help those in the disaster zone. You know? Here's our food drives, here's how we're running water in here's how we're raising money, whatever it might be, this is your time to to help, because the people who help at the end of the day are the ones who are going to be rewarded after the event?

Alex Husner  21:23  
Yeah, I will say, I think, during that last storm that we had a couple years ago, our Myrtle Beach area did a phenomenal job at that. I mean, some of the major hotel groups, they did, like $39 a night rooms for, you know, first respondents and people trying to flood or get get out of North Carolina, which was hit much worse than we were, and we were supposed to be at the brunt of that storm, but it just it went further north. But we, you know, adjusted the sales and tried to help everybody as much as we could. But I do also remember Pete from the episode that you did, you and your family went to Atlanta, I think, during that storm, and everybody that, a lot of people went to Atlanta, but the hotel prices there were absolutely insane because they were doing the opposite of what you're you're telling us, they were really trying to take advantage of the situation. And it was the same thing if you went to Columbia or Raleigh. I mean, the regular hotel prices for just a basic room were like, four or $500 a night, and that's awful. I mean, people are leaving their jobs. They're they're scared, and it's just not the time to be trying to revenue manage and make money on this situation,

Pete DiMaio  22:24  
yeah? Because at the end of the day, people aren't going there for fun. They're going there because, you know, they have to, yeah, and you can use that as an opportunity to create a lifelong guest, yeah, bring them back. Yeah, yeah. Like, like, so, for instance, the Atlanta Braves. This is several years ago, but they were phenomenal. Yeah? So when you when you got to Atlanta, we actually booked a couple rooms because we weren't sure where we're going to evacuate to, and we end up going to Atlanta. But the Braves had, you know, free entry to the game, a a fun area for the kids, free food. They provided all kinds of all you had to do is show that you had a driver's license from an area impacted by the storm, yeah? And they just bent over backwards. As a result, our family went back there for a vacation just to check it out, because we had such a good, warm feeling, and they made us feel comfortable in a time that was very uncomfortable for us, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  23:14  
And I think again, you know, one thing that people overlook in these situations is that when people are evacuating to you or you're evacuating. It's a psychological thing. I mean, it's very stressful for those people that have to evacuate. So if you do find yourself in a situation where you are either evacuating or hosting an evacuee, you know, give them grace and understand that they're under so much stress because they don't know what's going on, where they came from, and what they're going back to. And so, you know, I think it's, it's reciprocal. You want to just make sure that you're fostering again, going back to being hospitable.

Alex Husner  23:43  
Yeah? Yeah, that's what we all do. At the end of the day, we are supposed to be hospitable, yeah? The time to show it well, what's what's next? Pete, what's the third? P,

Pete DiMaio  23:53  
it's not so. So once you get the third bullet point, so from there you, once you have your email planned out, think about your social campaigns and your communication management beyond just the email side. Yeah, so first and foremost, if you're look at all your paid campaigns from a social perspective, and pause anything you're paying money for, because odds are all the traffic you're getting from a social perspective, all of the engagement is not to book their next vacation, right? Yeah, and it's not going to have a return. So yeah, let's save your money for after the storm, yeah, and focus on on the helping side. But also, you know, plan to increase your post frequency significantly, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And I would also say, you know, here it's, this is not the time necessarily for unique content, either, and it's definitely not time for speculation. This is the time for, you know, resharing expert opinion or expert forecast and also helping people who have questions, you know, so so be have a very high engagement level and be a helper. Yeah,

Alex Husner  24:59  
I think. Making sure that somebody is checking your social media accounts frequently for messages. That's super important, because people are guests are going to be asking you all the questions there. And you know, really, you know, pausing your ads, if you don't pause your ads, if you forget to do that, that's going to spur more messages, because a lot of people are going to see them and get very angry. And I remember there was one storm that we had forgotten to turn some on off, I'm sorry, and we just had bunch of guests are like, I can't believe you're telling us to come to North Myrtle Beach right now. There's a hurricane there, and we weren't trying to, but we learned our lesson on that one. So, yeah, making sure that you pause your ads for sure. Yes, I

Annie Holcombe  25:37  
think on that note, one thing that I think people forget is, you know, the stuff, you have stuff that you're in control of from any any of your advertising, but then you have stuff that you've contracted with other vendors to run advertising, and you have to make sure that the person that's going to be overseeing all of this has the full calendar in front of them so they know what's being deployed. And because it could be a situation where it ad might not be running, but it might launch. You know, I've been in a situation where we were part of some VISIT FLORIDA campaigns, and they launched right in the middle of something, yeah, and then the phone started ringing, and people were like, again, to your point, why are you telling us to come here? But it was something we had signed up for six, seven months prior, and just didn't think about it. So it's, again, it's, it's, it's really having a 30,000 foot view of all of your marketing and all of your materials that and when they're going to be out, and if there's anything that kind of falls in that zone of concern, you know, make sure that you're addressing, you know, either through your contact at media site or source to pause it. Yeah, and

Pete DiMaio  26:33  
Annie, that's exactly why you want to have that plan in advance. Because you know, when the storm is 48, hours from hitting or whatever it might be. You have other things on your mind. You're not going to be able to stop and say, oh, let's go ahead and review my, you know, 2022 media plan and see what I change. Right? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But if you have a checklist that says, you know, follow up with this, follow up with this, follow up with this, either you can do that yourself, or you can hand that off to somebody and say, Hey, I just need this taken care of. So you can focus on other other areas, either operationally or marketing wise.

Alex Husner  27:03  
Yep, absolutely, absolutely, right. So, so

Pete DiMaio  27:06  
from a social perspective, I would say you be out there, be engaging, don't be opportunistic, and just share factual information as much as possible. Yeah, I

Annie Holcombe  27:15  
think, you know, the hurricanes or just disasters in general, I don't know about South Carolina. Can speak for Florida, we kind of make fun of it. You know, we have them so frequently that there's a lot of memes that get shared. And I think you have to make sure that you're mindful of not letting some of those memes creep in again. Oh, yeah, it can be off putting, especially to owners. How could you guys be joking about this? And it's like, yeah, it's fun and games for people that live in that situation, on some levels, just for sanity, but you have to be mindful that the humor needs to be somewhat left out of the equation. Now,

Alex Husner  27:45  
one thing that's not on the list here, and I'm not sure which category it would fall into, but I mean, it's slightly operational, but also marketing. A lot of the inquiries that we get during this time as people reaching out, whether it's on social media or emailing us asking, you know, can I reschedule? Can I get my money back. Can I whatever cancel? You need to make sure that plan, whatever it is that you determine, is clearly communicated to the staff and to the people that are going to be monitoring the social media so that you have that plan. I mean, if they don't have the ability to answer or give a verdict on every reservation, who do they who does the guests need to contact? Do they need to call the office? If the office is going to be closed, what do they do? Are you telling them to wait until next week, once everybody hopefully the storm has passed, but just figuring that out ahead of time, because I know as a marketer, that's always been something that has been a little bit stressful on some of the storms is, you know, there's just so many different variables, and whether somebody has travel insurance or doesn't have travel insurance, what the reservation is, and there's no way that our marketing team can answer all those questions, but just making sure that you have the plan in place for who you need to be directing people to for the information, that's

Pete DiMaio  28:50  
a really good point in operations and marketing. We always talk about breaking down those silos. That's a perfect place where, yeah, that needs to be broken down in advance. So yeah, the marketing team knows, knows what to say, Yeah. And that's the other thing too. Is you, as you're communicating from email perspective or from a social as the storm is ending, continue that communication process, right? Let people know the storm has passed. Use use photos, use video, and show actually what's happening at the property. You always have to think that you know the news. Their job is impressions. Their job is engagement and making the event seem as big of a deal as it possibly is. They're

Alex Husner  29:26  
not gonna always stand shining once everything's better. Yeah, yeah.

Pete DiMaio  29:30  
I mean, the best day to visit the beach is always the day after Hurricane, because it's no humidity. It's a Yeah, beautiful day, yeah. But the noose is going to want to harp on, disaster, disaster. If that's not the case, don't, you know, pump up your location recklessly. But if there's nothing wrong, share the photos, you know, share the video and let people know. Hey, we're back on put for business. Yeah, if you had a reservation, now's a great time to stay with us. And

Alex Husner  29:57  
even, like you said about the webcam, I think just how. A webcam on your website. There's a million different benefits to why you want to have that, but in this situation, you can be directing people back to it to see exactly you want to see what's going on live. Go to our webcam. Don't watch the weather channel. Watch our webcam. But I know during the hurricanes, our webcam page, the visits just went through the roof. I mean, our traffic was unbelievable. But, I mean, the good thing that that produces, if somebody finds it during a hurricane, you kind of become the source of truth for other things at that point. So webcam has a lot, a lot of different benefits, but, yeah, it's one of them.

Pete DiMaio  30:32  
So perfect. So, so next thing I would say is, and this is a brief one, but your pay per click, your better search campaigns and your other paid campaigns, yeah, turn them off. Yeah. Turn them off because they're and nobody's gonna be able to book and there's no reason to drive people to to those pages. Yeah. Just as important as turning them off is turning them back on.

Alex Husner  30:53  
Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah. That

Pete DiMaio  30:54  
happens a lot, you know, yeah, someone's Hey, we gotta pause the campaign, yeah? And then days go by. Oh, you know what? We probably should turn that back on, because it's and

Alex Husner  31:03  
it's almost like, as part of this checklist, you want to list out all the sites where you have ads running that it might not just be the typical Google and Bing, like Myrtle beach.com or, you know, your local portal side. And there's a lot of different places where you can turn ads on and off. Make sure that that's listed out ahead of time. Because one thing you have to consider, too, if you're the marketer that you make this list for yourself, God forbid. I mean, you might, because of the storm, not be able to be the one that is executing on doing this. So you want that workflow of how this all works to be as clear and concise with instructions and contact info as possible. So there's somebody else on the team has to pick up these duties. They know exactly what to do,

Pete DiMaio  31:42  
yep. And then I say the last thing on that note, particularly from a paid side, is if you have an agency or you have something, you can hand this off to make sure that any campaigns that are running or will be running, that you're being very cognizant of your negative keywords. You don't want, let's say I'm outside the disaster zone. I don't want someone doing a search and we're in, say, Myrtle Beach, in this case, I don't want someone doing a search for Jacksonville and getting an ad for Myrtle Beach that could come across as being very opportunistic, right? And make it look like we're taking advantage of people in another market just because they have disaster hitting there. So, so kind of keep that in mind, even if you're outside the disaster zone, you do want to look at your campaigns and make sure that you're not being the bad guy. Yeah, all right, so kind of from there, before we jump into guest and community assistance, I want to real quickly talk about the PR side and the outreach, because this is very important, in advance of a an event making sure you know who your media contacts are. Yes, what can you be doing to proactively reach out to local and regional media contacts, to provide to make yourself a point of contact, to help

Annie Holcombe  32:53  
you build up that trust, so the next time something happens, they're going to contact you. And yeah, source of that source of truth for your destination. That's a really good point. Yeah, it's

Alex Husner  33:02  
just a good media strategy overall, and not to try and capitalize on these things. But the more that you can work with your local media on any kind of events like that or news, making sure they know how to contact you, you do. You do become the trusted source. And I think we've, we've been able to do that in a lot of cases in the last couple years. And it's, it's great that they come to us now and they ask for our take on things. So it's an easy strategy, that it doesn't take a whole lot of work, and it doesn't cost anything. So that's part of it, right?

Pete DiMaio  33:30  
Yeah. And here's the thing too, is, you know, we talked about, we're gonna be very busy in times of a disaster, but the media is also, they have a million different signals coming in, and if you can make their job easy by saying, Here's a webcam, you know, here's the photos that we're going to be posting on an ongoing basis. Here's our plan, and here's what, how you can take advantage of those tools. It makes it very easy for a news outlet to just come to you, get information, get a quote, and run with their story. Here's one thing

Alex Husner  33:58  
that happened during covid, and I think it probably has happened during the storms too, but it's most fresh in my mind. Fresh in my mind from covid, when we were dealing when we were in the phase where we didn't know if we were going to be refunding money or changing reservations, or, you know, anything that was going on in that time, a lot of guests were reaching out to the local media and saying, you know, I can't get my money back. What do I do? And like that, that became just its own disaster in itself. But we ended up, we worked closely with a couple of the media sources at that at that time that came to us, and we were actually able to correct some issues with guests that they had been told something early on when we didn't really have the whole plan in place, because nobody did during covid. We were able to correct some situations because they had gone to the media. But that's, you know, just to get the message out there properly. Because the media can also spend things the wrong way, as we all know. You don't want them telling the wrong story that you know, Hoteliers and vacation rental managers, they're just not being supportive of the people that are in the zone, just because they just don't have the right information on what's going on. Yeah, but to your

Annie Holcombe  34:59  
point. Point you know about kind of nurturing that relationship. I think that if you become the source of someone you know, for the media to contact back, you know, it's a reciprocal relationship that way, when somebody does contact them with something that an angry guest or an angry visitor, they're going to say, wait a minute before I do this story. You know, let me call Alex and ask what's really going on before we do anything with it, and and that's important, because you can get ahead of something quick before it happens. And

Alex Husner  35:25  
it is a challenge, I'll say because, I mean, in our market, I'm sure in everybody else's too, the turnover of reporters at these media stations is expand. I mean, it's all the time. There's always new blood coming in, so it's a challenge, but if you can find somebody kind of a little bit higher up that you can keep in touch with, that isn't getting turned over often, that they can be at least pointing their reporters in the right direction. That's good strategy, absolutely, all right.

Pete DiMaio  35:49  
The last thing I have is on the guest and community assistance. In my mind, this is where hoteliers have a very, very unique opportunity to step up and be a community leader when it is, you know, to go back to the covid saying, of now, more than ever, this is a time where, together, yeah, exactly. This is the time for, for a hotelier to say, You know what I have, most likely, if you're on a coast, you have a hurricane and a FEMA compliant type facility, you probably have some type of F and B operation. You have rooms, you have workspace. So you have all the tools to help people in the disaster zone, but you also have the tools, if people are evacuating, to have a safe place to stage so, so become that leader and open your doors as much as possible to the community. Yeah, this is so important, because this is one, not only, the right thing to do, and I think at the end of the day, we all have to go to sleep and feel good about what we were doing in life. And this is a great way to do that, but it's also just a great way to to help the community and to build that goodwill that's always, it's karma. It always is going to come back at you. So

Annie Holcombe  36:58  
most recently, with Hurricane Michael a few years ago. It was really interesting, because people tend to think that hurricanes hit the coasts and it's just the beachfront that gets, you know, devastated. And in our case, it was really more inland. The beach itself kind of was a little our beach anyway, was a little bit away from the center, so they didn't get a lot of damage. And so for the locals that live in the community that actually work at these properties, we had to evacuate after, you know, my husband and I, we moved out there after five, six days with no power and water. We finally went out there and stayed in a condo for a week and a week and a half. But you know, you will become a source for your your greater you know, community, not just that the people that are right there on the beach or right there on the coast, it could be 50 miles inland, and again, you know, they're going to remember that. And it's all about just at the end of the day, it's just about being just a good human. And like you said, karma is going to karma is going to help you and and I will never forget the people that that hosted us. I mean, they didn't charge us to stay with them. You know, we stayed for well over a week, and they were great and just again, empathetic and understood that everybody in the community was suffering, and they just opened their doors graciously to do it. So

Pete DiMaio  38:14  
I think a big part of that is whether you're inside or outside the disaster area or the danger zone. I think we talked it's very timely. Yeah, you want to be very flexible, because you don't know the moment that's going to be the best time for you to step up and be a leader or just be someone who's a facilitator. Yeah, you may find that you need to help your employees with a place to stay. You may find out that, in the case of Florence, years ago, you may need to be a place that's a staging area for making sandbags and distributing sandbags to the riverfront areas. Yeah, you don't know what it's going to be, but if you keep your nose to you know in the media, understand what's happening and say, You know what, I'm a hotelier, but I'm also just remember the community. And I can step up and you open up my FB operation, and have a have a soup kitchen, whatever it might be, look outside of what you're comfortable with and and help, because nobody's comfortable, so you might as well be uncomfortable to everybody else, but at least you're you're helping,

Alex Husner  39:17  
right? Very true. We're all on it together, yeah, yeah, absolutely so.

Pete DiMaio  39:20  
But I think if we kind of have this plan in advance, yeah, we kind of laid out by having the other things taken care of, it makes it a lot easier, yeah, for you to be a great helper to the community and be able to contribute, because everyone else is gonna be worried about checking those boxes that we've already taken care

Alex Husner  39:38  
of, right? And just even having the blueprint that you know, there's going to be copy and there's going to be parts of this that you're going to have to write in the moment, but having the blueprint that at least alleviates some of the stress ahead of time, so you have that checkbox and you don't forget anything. I mean, just simple things like, of course, turn your PPC and your your meta ads off, but turn them back on. That's such a great point. You. Know, just little things like that, that if you forgot about it, and you find out a week later, you're going to be kicking yourself, but and then reaching out to the owners, once everything is done, and letting them know that you know whatever the outcome was and how you're going to handle the reschedulings and the cancelations and any damage, that's kind of the ending to, hopefully, what was not a really bad danger zone. Quickly.

Annie Holcombe  40:28  
One thing I would add is that I've done in the past, too, is those guests that are going to be coming in in the next, you know, 1014, days, proactively reach out to them and let them know, you know, and they and they may not be paying attention, because again, they're thinking, Oh, that storm is two weeks before my vacation. It didn't even enter their mind to worry about it. So you can proactively reach out to them to let them know, like, hey, we did have a storm. Everything's fine. Absolutely, from their stay, yeah, I think that's important too. And again, it goes back to just being in communication with people. So there's no doubt and there's no worry in their minds.

Alex Husner  41:01  
We always, we always have one campaign that works. Has worked for all of them, the coast is clear. North Myrtle Beach chamber launched that during, I think, Hurricane Matthew, or after Hurricane Matthew, and then that kind of just became the staple tagline for all of us, once the coast is clear. But I will say, and Pete, you probably remember this too. There was some controversy with people saying The coast is clear when it actually wasn't clear, like it was done ahead of time. And that wasn't because they scheduled the emails wrong. That was because they were trying to get people back to the beach, yeah, too early. But I think in that case, it was because the roads were flooded that, technically, yes, it was beautiful weather, but if people tried to get here, they were going to get stuck in their cars.

Pete DiMaio  41:43  
Yeah, not the time to

Alex Husner  41:46  
don't jump the gun, right the Top Gun and the danger zone. We're really trying to fit that in here. Top Gun is in theaters right now, so disaster zone headphones on right now,

Pete DiMaio  42:04  
but yeah, I think with having this plan, I think we first wrote this article back in 2018 and we've been evolving it ever since everything we talked about was put into place when covid hit. So we're talking about Yeah, yeah. We're talking about things like, in case of a yeah, in this case, a hurricane. But those same strategies were the ones that we use when covid first hit, and we had to, you know, change our pay strategies. We had to reach out to the community. We had to do all the things that had to get done anyway, but at least we had a starting point, and we went through and crossed out hurricane and wrote in pandemic, covid. Yeah,

Alex Husner  42:39  
one perfect example of that, what, during the last hurricane, we made a document that had the contact information of all of the HOAs. We've got approximately 500 condos, but that's within 120 different buildings. So I mean, there's a lot of different companies that manage all the properties that we had to make sure our information and contact was was accurate when covid hit. That was so helpful to have that, because the main issue we had was that some of the HOAs were not opening the pools, or some were opening the pools, but not the hot tub. Some were having chairs on the deck, but not this, not that, no lazy river. And trying to manage that was probably as complicated as managing a hurricane communication plan, because there's so many different properties and that guests were just going nuts asking us questions about that. So that was great to have that document in place already with the contact information and a spreadsheet already prepared for a different reason. But you know, what is open? What is not open? What services are there? So just get that ahead of time. It'll help you no matter what. Yeah, it's

Annie Holcombe  43:37  
kind of timely for any disaster. I mean, just having that frame, like you said having that framework, yep, and you just, you know, pivot based on what the actual circumstances are, yeah,

Alex Husner  43:46  
absolutely. Well, this was a great episode, you know, great discussion, and I love that this is you're, you're the first guest to come back the second time, and I hope that we'll have you back many other times, because you've got just such a wealth of information, and you've shared a lot of this previously in your on your blog, travel boom marketing, and on the hotel marketing podcast, and so there's just a lot of great topics that are 100% relevant for us as vacation rental managers and marketers. So we're going to be thinking of the next one that we want to pull you back in on. We don't know what it is yet, but we'll be having you back as our subject matter expert.

Pete DiMaio  44:18  
Absolutely I am honored to be on the show, and even more honored to be invited back when I am. Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Husner  44:24  
How can our listeners find you and your podcast? What's the best way? So

Pete DiMaio  44:29  
the best way is check out travel boom marketing.com from there, if you go to travel boom marketing.com/podcast you'll see all the episodes of the hotel Marketing Podcast, in addition to being able to find it on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wherever you you get a podcast. Definitely check it out. Listen to it a lot of times. We'll reference the content that we wrote. You know, in this case, we wrote this article disaster planning communication guide for hotels,

Alex Husner  44:55  
and we'll list it on the show notes. Too. Awesome. Thank you. But yeah, and

Pete DiMaio  44:59  
if you. To connect with us. You can also find us on typically, LinkedIn is the best way at travel boom marketing to connect and learn a bit more about what we do.

Alex Husner  45:07  
Awesome. We'll include all your links in our show notes, and we appreciate you very much. If anybody wants to contact Annie and I you can go to Alex and anniepodcast.com and until next time, thank you everybody for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.

Annie Holcombe  45:22  
Thanks, Pete,

Pete DiMaio  45:24  
thanks so much. See you guys. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai