A Strike Strands a Third of Your Attendees

A national rail strike and a snowstorm have combined the night before. Two hundred attendees, three of five keynote speakers and your AV crew cannot reach the city.

Setting: Two-day professional congress, 600 registered, city centre venue, evening before day 1. Category: Event Operations. Pressure level: High.

This page is the individual, citable address for this one situation: https://gatheringarchitecture.com/crisis-sim/scenario/travel-collapse

The situation

At 20:00 the strike is confirmed for both congress days. Your opening keynote is stuck 300km away, the AV crew's van is off the motorway, and your inbox has 140 emails asking whether the congress is going ahead.

First moves and what each one costs

• Publish a status page and a clear 'we are going ahead' message within the hour, then triage speakers, crew and attendees separately — Inbound calls drop by morning. You know by 23:00 exactly which sessions have no speaker and which have no equipment.
• Answer attendees individually as they write in — Your team spends the night on 140 replies and no one reshapes the programme. Day 1 opens with an empty stage.
• Postpone the congress by a month — Four hundred people who can reach the city are told to go home, and a month's rebooking begins for a two-day disruption.

Preparation notes for this situation

• Know which roles are single points of failure and have a named substitute for each
• Publish one travel-status page and update it on a schedule, so attendees stop calling your mobile
• Reshape the programme around who is actually in the city, rather than holding slots for people who are not coming
• Anyone who cannot travel should be offered something real: a live link, a later session, or their money back

Open the Game Plan · Run the Simulation · See all 20 scenarios