What WestJet's Strike Resolution Teaches About the Second Half of a Crisis

On 3 August, WestJet and its flight attendants' union CUPE reached a tentative agreement, ending the strike and lockout notices that had cancelled hundreds of flights across the airline's network over the preceding days. Most of the coverage through the disruption itself focused, reasonably, on the operational chaos: cancelled flights, stranded passengers, a network under visible strain. The resolution got a fraction of that attention, and that gap is worth examining, because it is the same gap in most crisis communications plans.

Why do so many crisis plans stop at the disruption itself?

Crisis planning tends to concentrate on the first seventy two hours: the holding statement, the spokesperson briefing, the channel strategy for managing an active, visible problem. That work matters, and getting it wrong is genuinely damaging. But a plan that ends there treats the crisis as a single event with a beginning and an end point, when in reputational terms it has two distinct halves, and the second is where trust is actually rebuilt or lost for good.

What does the second half of a crisis actually require?

Three things tend to separate a resolution that rebuilds trust from one that just ends the news cycle.

• A clear, plain account of what changed. Not a statement that the situation has "been resolved", but specifics: what was agreed, what it means for the people affected, and what happens next. WestJet's own confirmation to CUPE members, followed by a ratification vote, is a structurally sound version of this: a defined next step, not a vague all clear.

• Direct communication to the people who were most affected, before the wider public statement. Passengers who were stranded and staff who were on strike need to hear the resolution from the company directly, not read it in the same news cycle as everyone else.

• A crisis communications plan that explicitly covers the resolution stage, not just the response, including who signs off the closing statement and what proof points support it.

How do you know when it is actually safe to say a crisis is over?

Not when the immediate disruption stops making headlines. A tentative agreement still needs a ratification vote, a recall still needs the replacement stock on shelves, a data breach still needs the affected accounts secured. The organisations that get this wrong are the ones that declare victory at the first sign of relief rather than the point of actual resolution, and then have to walk the statement back if the vote fails or the fix does not hold. Genuine reputation recovery is measured over months, not the news cycle, a useful discipline against declaring the story closed too early.

What should founders and marketing leaders outside travel take from this?

Very few businesses will face a strike, but most will eventually face some version of the same structure: a visible problem, a period of real reputational exposure, and then a resolution that either gets communicated with the same care as the disruption, or gets treated as a formality because the hard part already happened. It rarely is a formality. The resolution is the point where the people who were watching closely, customers, staff, investors, decide whether the organisation handled the whole situation well or just survived the worst of it.

A crisis communications plan that only covers the first seventy two hours is half a plan. As a Senior Freelance PR Consultant, the resolution stage, who says what, to whom, and in what order, is where I spend as much preparation time as the initial response, because it is the part most plans skip and the part clients remember longest.

If your business has a crisis plan that stops at the response and has never actually mapped the resolution, talk to Fireflies Management.