The Bureau of Meteorology’s outlook, issued on 1 October, says El Niño “is at near-record levels” and is expected to peak in late spring or summer. Minimum temperatures have a better than 80% chance of being above average across almost all of Australia, and rainfall below average in the far north and the south-east, including Tasmania and parts of Victoria (Bureau of Meteorology, October 2026⁠ (opens in a new tab)). AFAC’s spring bushfire outlook had already flagged increased fire risk in northern and south-eastern NSW, south-east Queensland, north-eastern Tasmania, large parts of the Northern Territory and parts of Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria (AFAC, August 2026⁠ (opens in a new tab)).

None of that means a fire in your region. It does mean that this is the summer to have the destination website ready before you need it, with the crisis page written well before the smoke arrives.

This checklist is about the website. It assumes you already have, or are part of, a regional emergency communications plan.

A destination website has two jobs in an emergency. It must send people to the official warnings, quickly and unmistakably. And it must tell Visitors and Operators what the event means for travel, accurately and without alarm.

It must not try to be the warning service. Warnings change by the hour, and the emergency services publish them under the national Australian Warning System, with three levels: Advice, Watch and Act, and Emergency Warning (Australian Warning System, DFES⁠ (opens in a new tab)). Link to them. Never paraphrase them, never screenshot them and never repeat a warning level in your own words, because yours will be out of date first.

Before the season: prepare once

  1. Write the crisis page now, and leave it unpublished. One page, one address you won’t change (for example /travel-advice), with sections ready to fill: what is happening, where, what it means for travel, roads, Operators, events and where to get official information. Have it approved before summer, so that on the day the only job is deciding to publish it.
  2. Prepare a site-wide banner. Short, plain, linked to the crisis page. Decide in advance who can switch it on, and test it on a phone.
  3. Collect the official links. Your state’s emergency warnings site and app, the fire service, road closures, the Bureau, and the local council. Put them on the crisis page now and check that every one resolves.
  4. Decide who publishes. Name two people who can publish at 7pm on a Sunday, and make sure both have working logins and know where the page is.
  5. Agree the words with partners. Your council, state tourism organisation and neighbouring regions will all publish. Agree the place names, the closure language and the tone, so a Visitor reading three sites doesn’t get three stories.
  6. Write the recovery message too. “Open” pages and a recovery campaign take as long to approve as the crisis page. Draft them now.

When it happens: the first hour

  1. Publish the crisis page and switch on the banner.
  2. State what you know and when you last updated it, with the time and date at the top. Update the time every time you touch the page.
  3. Link to the official warnings in the first paragraph.
  4. Say where it is, by name, and where it is not. Visitors from interstate often can’t place one town against another, and a fire 200 kilometres away can empty a whole region’s bookings if the page is vague.
  5. Pause campaigns, social posts and newsletters that send people towards the affected area.

During the event: keep it true

Operator status. Operators will ask you to say they are open, closed or unaffected. Collect it in one place, with the date of each update, and show it on the crisis page or on the Products themselves. An Operator 40 minutes from the fire front who is open and wants Visitors deserves to be found.

Events. Mark postponed and cancelled events on the event page, with the date of the decision. Don’t delete them: people are searching for them by name.

AI answers. Assistants and search engines read your pages. A page that says “open daily, all summer” next to a road that is closed is the kind of fact an assistant will repeat. Update the Products and pages affected, not only the crisis page, and keep the crisis page’s dates current, so a machine reader can tell new information from old.

Load. Traffic to a destination site can jump sharply during an emergency, with people checking on family, travel plans and roads, much of it on mobile networks under strain. Keep the crisis page light: text first, small images, no video, no heavy maps.

After the event: recovery

The hardest part of a fire season for many regions is the months after, when the fire is out but the bookings don’t come back, because the last thing people saw was the crisis page.

  1. Update the crisis page to say clearly what is open, with a date, then retire the banner.
  2. Publish the “open” pages you drafted, with specific, current reasons to visit, Operators by name and events with dates.
  3. Remove or rewrite every page that still describes the emergency in the present tense.
  4. Ask Operators to update their ATDW profiles, so the Products on your site and everywhere else show they are back.
  5. Tell the story honestly. Visitors respond to “here is what the river looks like this month, and here is who is open”.

A ten-minute test you can run this week

  • Can two named people log in and publish a page tonight?
  • Does the unpublished crisis page exist, with working official links?
  • Does the banner work on a phone?
  • Do your Product pages show opening days and seasonal closures as text?
  • Is there a recovery draft waiting?

If any answer is no, start there.

On Roam

On Roam, your team edits and publishes pages with the page builder, with role-based permissions, scheduled publishing and version history, so the crisis page and banner don’t need a developer. Roam EdgeGuard keeps the public site up when the origin server has problems, by serving your content from the edge cache. That protects against an outage; it doesn’t replace keeping the crisis page current, which stays your team’s job. See how Roam’s infrastructure works.