Andy Cooper reflects on the implications of a recent landslide at the height of the ski season
Some years ago, I undertook some work with a major ski tour operator, to train its management on emergency procedures and undertook a crisis simulation to practise the learnings.
I chose as the scenario for the exercise a landslide on the main road into Val D’Isere and Tignes, one of the major skiing areas in the French Alps, which closed access to those resorts and left customers stranded and unable to return for their flights back to the UK.
We have recently seen an example of life imitating art (if I can be so brave as to describe my scenario planning as ‘art’), with a significant rock fall in Aigueblanche, near Moutiers, which can fairly be described as the gateway to the major ski resorts in the French Alps.
Unlike my scenario, which only affected two albeit quite large resorts, this rockfall prevented access to the Three Valleys area (Courcheval, Meribel and Val Thorens), the Paradiski area (La Plagne and Les Arcs) as well as Tignes and Val D’Isere.
To make matters worse, the rockfall occurred on a Saturday morning at a time when traffic on the roads to and from the resorts was at its peak.
One major surprise was that no-one was killed by the rockfall, although I get the impression there were some very fortunate survivors.
The blockage on what is the only road access to a critical part of French tourism infrastructure during the peak arrival months for ski tourism has to be a matter of major concern, and this made me think about the impacts on tour operators and, indeed, on any other business involved in ski programmes to France.
Any travel business has to be conscious of ‘critical points of failure’ and how the business would respond to any problem arising from those points of failure.
In this instance, I would hope the team I trained, if still working for the tour operator in question or elsewhere offering ski programmes, would remember some of the learning points from that exercise.
While it is highly unlikely the lessons from that day would be implemented automatically, there will hopefully be a framework which was followed to address some of the challenges which arose.
The same principle has to apply to all businesses operating to that part of France.
I can appreciate there would have been a sense of panic and confusion on the Saturday morning when this occurred, but provided that a business has thought about the risks and undertaken some preparation, then short term solutions could be found to help manage the affected customers.
One of the downsides of the modern information age is that many of those affected will have quickly found news items describing what had happened and some will have tried to come up with imaginative (and not always helpful) suggestions as to how the problems could be sorted.
Those travel businesses with staff directly in contact with customers would undoubtedly have had some ‘interesting’ discussions. However, skiing is not a cheap holiday option, and I’m sure many customers will have wanted to protect what they could of their holidays.
An ability to deal with the challenging customers in this environment would have been critical.
In the longer term, I have seen some speculation that rockfalls in the Alps will become more common due to climate change, partly as a result of the thawing permafrost. This makes having a plan to deal with this type of incident, whenever it may occur, even more important.
Ski resorts are already under some pressure with inconsistent winter snow and the concept that access to resorts may be damaged as well is something we all need to plan for.
The key message here is that if a business is not prepared for this type of incident, the impacts will be significant. Even if an incident itself is unavoidable, a well-prepared business should be able to minimise the impacts.
Andy Cooper is principal at Owens Cooper Consulting and former director general of the Federation of Tour Operators