Carnival PR Crisis

Hiya readers!

This week I’m going to talk about the Carnival Cruise Lines PR Crisis that happened around two weeks ago. If you aren’t aware of the situation basically the cruise ship Triumph left from Texas on Thursday February 7th and on Sunday 10th a fire broke out in the engine of the cruise ships causing the engine to fail. This lead to a five day hellish experience for cruise-goers onboard as the ship was towed by smaller boats over five days to safety and passengers disembarked in Mobile, Alabama.

This obviously is crisis situation for the company with crew members and passengers in such a situation, reports said toilet sewage had over flown and was seeping into carpets and there were food rationing. The company had to deal with overwhelming amounts of calls and queries from concerned family members, customers due to board the cruise at the next stage and not forgetting the members of media with questions.The company used social media to update everyone on a very regular basis and are a good example of how a company should deal with a PR crisis like this one online. I’m going to divide each section of social media up and tell you all what they did on each site.

Twitter:  The company updated most frequently on Twitter, which makes sense as it is easy to give a short quick updates throughout the day on the situation. They were tweeting about all aspects of the situation from who would get to disembark the ship first, how luggage would be removed from the ship and how guests would get home after disembarking. They covered almost every angle on their Twitter possible and it would have been reassuring for family members concerned to have this information available instantly. They made one minor mistake however by attempting humour during the situation by tweeting “Of course the bathrobes for the Carnival Triumph are complimentary”. This was not appropriate during the situation however as no passengers were injured or harmed this minor mistake stayed fairly under the radar.

They did not reply to individuals on their Twitter page which was a good move as it would have been confusing for those trying to read updates and all information required was on their Twitter feed, they didn’t hide anything which was a good move by the company. Here is a small sample of their Twitter feed. (All tweets can be found here: https://twitter.com/CarnivalCruise)

Facebook: They also utilised their Facebook page and updated this page a little less frequently with longer , press release like statements, including statuses of tugboats, statements from company CAO and links to sites where customers affected could reschedule or refund their planned trip onboard Triumph. They stated that they were aware of the suffering of the passengers onboard and that they felt sympathy for the passengers at this time. The initial post on the matter on Facebook was shared 2,038 times and got over 3,000 likes. Here is the first statement released by the company on their Facebook page: (Here is the link for all their Facebook posts: http://www.facebook.com/Carnival)

YouTube: Not the most frequently used tool during a PR crisis but Carnival decided to take this approach and posted the video of their Press Conference on February 12th.After watching the video the speaker seems a little insincere with his apologies and perhaps it should just have been the media that had access to the press conference to report on the matter rather than the public. The video got over 29,000 views on YouTube, if you want to check it out here it is:

Website: Their website was updated twice. One to announced cruises that had been cancelled due to the incident and another announcing the compensation, these were appropriate as the same amount of detail was not required on their website when they were maintaining the social networking sites so regularly. Here is the link to the updates on their site: http://www.carnival.com/Core/FAQ.aspx?faq=update

Overall the company utilised their sites to the best possible standards and used each social networking site for the best purpose it was intended, Twitter for short regular updates, Facebook for more detailed information and their website for the need-to-know information. Although the company used the social networking sites well and handled the situation well on a PR level it is yet to be seen if the company will recover from such a large incident. Hopefully they raise their safety standards and continue to do business.

Thanks for reading!

Cici