Turkish holiday from hell crisis - vultures circle as bad news mounts

The stories of food bugs, excrement in pools and indifferent reps at the Holiday Village in Sarigerme, Turkey, are showing up across the web. Along with a string of damning reviews, there are lawyers tauting their wares and courting clients who wish to sue their tour operator.

It is a situation we are frequently called about, and a case study in how bad news can spread in an uncontrolled way - to date neither the resort or the tour operator involved have launched a visible PR offensive to rebutt these stories.

Click here to read the reviews on the Holiday Watchdog site.

Creating a Data Warehouse - part of crisis planning

When faced with a barrage of questions about their company in a crisis situation, the spokesperson of a company needs to have all manner of information at their fingertips. Some of the examples docleaf often feature in our training workshops where things went wrong relate to the delay (or total omission) in getting the critical information to the key people in time to project a confident and competent face to the waiting media.

George Ray focuses on this matter in his blog here, and cites the well-known response of Pepsi as a example of how it should be done.

Should losing your clothes mean losing your job?

When a school teacher in Australia decided to pose nude for a magazine, her employers were far from impressed and promptly suspended her. This has sparked a public debate in the country, with conflicting views as to whether the magazine shoot was a private matter that should not impact on the woman's professional life.

How would you react if one of your employee's shot to fame in this way? Would you feel they were exposing the company to unnecessary risk?

Read the Couraud blog and discussion here.

Seat choice - a matter of life and death?

Do you worry about where to sit on a plane when you check in? Is your choice governed by comfort, or where you think the drinks trolley will start its journey? A study commissioned by the CAA suggests that where you sit on a flight will strongly determine your chances of surviving a crash.

Read more in the Times article here:

docleaf Briefs

Buenos Aires (Reuters) -Furious rail commuters in Argentina set fire to a train last week in anger over delays during the morning rush hour.

Television images showed black smoke and flames engulfing the train at the station of Merlo, in the western suburbs of the capital, Buenos Aires. At nearby Castelar, passengers hurled stones at the ticket office and blocked the rails.

"We understand that people get angry when the service is delayed or canceled, but they absolutely can't attack a public service in this way," Gustavo Gago, a spokesman for rail company TBA, told local television. Many passengers said the delays, caused by a broken down train, had cost them a day's work.

Argentina's dilapidated rail services are plagued by delays and travelers' anger sometimes erupts into violence.

Last year, commuters torched a carriage at a station south of the capital and rioting broke out at a main railway station when passengers clashed with police, causing dozens of injuries and arrests.

And finally..If in Shanghai, cross the road on a red at your peril... Police will post photos and videos of jaywalkers in newspapers and on TV in a bid to shame them out of breaking traffic rules, local media reported on Thursday. (Reuters, Shanghai)

Offending pedestrians, moped riders and cyclists would be snapped at selected intersections and their images put in regular columns and on special television programmes set up by police, the Shanghai Daily said.

The scheme had come under fire from lawyers who said public humiliation was too steep a punishment for jaywalking and warned of defamation lawsuits against police. "It's a principle of law that a penalty should match the seriousness of the crime," Liu Chunquan, a local awyer, told the paper.

Jaywalking is a way of life in major Chinese cities, where crossing roads legally can be a hair-raising battle of nerves with oncoming cars disinclined to give way to pedestrians.Traffic police recorded 7.78 million jaywalking violations at Shanghai intersections in the first eight months of 2008, the paper said.