Not So Easy to Evacuate
While pundits and critics debate why people did not evacuate the Gulf Coast, I thought it would be useful for professionals in the lodging industry to learn about our experience.
There is no centralized hotel/motel reservation system to assist during a major evacuation.
Neither government nor relief agencies have addressed this bottleneck.
Hotel chains ceded control to local properties rendering (800) numbers useless.
Hotel Web sites indicated reservations could no longer be accepted online.
We called over 50 properties individually looking for space.
Overwhelmed themselves, front desks resorted to using paper to tally reservations.
Evacuees without computers and Internet access would not have found out of town hotel telephone numbers readily.
Some people hedge their bets by making multiple reservations in various cities, holding them until the last possible second before canceling - artificially depleting the emergency inventory.
This one major breakdown in the system had the most impact on the time we had to pack (little).
It took us five (5) hours before we landed a reservation .
Our experience was exacerbated because of special needs: handicap accessible and pet friendly. That was like threading a needle during a hurricane.
There was limited-to-no messaging advising people they could stay in rest areas (normally illegal).
It was not until we started driving that we found out that the Red Cross had set up tents at interstate exchanges to divert those without hotel reservations to shelters.
Systems, processes and communication failed to save lives.
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Locating safe harbor is one item for which you can't prepare until you know the projected path of the hurricane. Then, you head far inland in the opposite direction.
Until the lodging industry, relief agencies and/or government address this issue, many people are going to remain cut off in their quest to find shelter from the storm. This issue is not socio-economic. Some homes do not have computers or broadband, and there will always be a percentage of people who don't know how to manually search for lodging in unfamiliar cities.
Those with limited patience become frustrated and make the fatal decision to stay home. Seniors who cannot navigate this maze come up short. After the storm, we learned of two elderly neighbors of my dog sitter who could not locate a place to go in time.
They drowned.
posted by CP for Ragan @ 3:00 PM
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