Let's build a Crisis Response Room for Travel: What do we need to protect against Crisis?

This ITB Berlin 2026 deep-dive panel, titled 'Let's Build a Crisis Response Room for Travel,' ran for approximately 57 minutes (3,441 seconds) and brought together four practitioners and academics to examine how the travel sector responds to crises — from immediate communications to long-term resilience governance. The session was moderated by Prof. Dr. Harald Pechlaner, Founding Chair of the School of Transformation and Sustainability at Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt.

Martin Riecken, Managing Director & Owner of consultancy 11 Fifty-Nine (named for the minute before high noon — a metaphor for high-pressure moments), opened by arguing that resilience must be built long before a crisis hits. Drawing on 15 years at Lufthansa and 10 years at TUI, Riecken observed that crisis war rooms consistently suffer from unclear governance and slow decision authority, while social media ensures the public narrative is established before any official statement can be issued. He introduced the phrase 'transformation is the slow cousin of crisis,' arguing the psychological and communications mechanisms in transformation projects are nearly identical to those in acute crises.

Alastair Crossley, Global Head of Travel Solutions at AXA Partners, reframed the conversation by declaring that the industry is no longer in crisis management but in 'permanent poly-crisis.' He cited the AXA Future Risks Report (published annually in Q4) to identify the top three risks facing the sector: (1) climate change, (2) geopolitical risk, and (3) cyber risk. On climate financials, he delivered stark data: from 2002 to 2022, insurers paid an average of $60 billion per year in climate-related losses; by 2023 that figure had risen to $100 billion; and by mid-2025 the $100 billion threshold had already been surpassed. Crossley warned that the insurance industry covers only around one-third of total losses, meaning the remaining two-thirds fall on society. He noted a behavioral shift in travelers: searches for 'Caucasian' destinations are up 300% year-on-year, while footfall to Nordic regions and Iceland has risen as tourists flee heat-affected southern European destinations. Both the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Acropolis in Athens were closed in summer 2025 due to temperatures exceeding 40°C. He signaled that insurance pricing is shifting from regional buckets (Europe, Americas, Rest of World) to destination-specific or even island-specific pricing, meaning premiums in high-risk areas such as Greece will rise.

Dolores Ordóñez, Director of Anysolution and a PhD researcher on European data spaces, focused on the structural data gap in destination crisis management. She referenced a multi-year European Commission project on crisis response from the perspective of tourism destinations, finding that most DMOs (destination marketing organizations) lack basic crisis management competencies and that the communications interests of tourism promoters frequently conflict with the rapid-alert messaging of civil protection bodies. She described the Common European Tourism Data Space project (website: deployour.eu), a Commission-funded initiative now running, aimed at building a federated catalog of discoverable tourism datasets — from points of interest and their risk profiles to logistics data — that can be shared under defined conditions across public and private actors. A follow-on project called 'Facilitate' is generating a community of practice including training, mentoring, and peer-to-peer activities to make data-driven crisis decision-making operational rather than theoretical.

Ben Lynam, Head of Communications and Research at the Travel Foundation, introduced the concept of tourism as a first-responder asset, noting that the sector's beds, kitchens, supply chains, and logistics expertise make it uniquely positioned to support crisis-affected communities. He referenced a Travel Foundation report published approximately three years prior on climate justice, highlighting that small businesses in places like the Cook Islands are already finding themselves uninsurable. He proposed the concept of a climate justice fund to mobilize investment into vulnerable destinations that have longer adaptation journeys. He cited a striking statistic: only 18% of destinations have climate adaptation as part of their planning.

The panel converged on a 'bounce-back versus bounce-forward' resilience framework proposed by Pechlaner, distinguishing reactive crisis procedures from futures-oriented anticipation leadership. All panelists agreed that the sector's current over-reliance on procedural crisis playbooks must give way to scenario planning, governance reform, and cross-sector data collaboration. Riecken's closing call for 'looking after the crisis behind the crisis' and 'new thinking' rather than moving from crisis to crisis without learning captured the session's central thesis.