What is Aggressor Adventures doing to help prevent the spread of illness while on one of your adventures? As you can imagine, that is the most asked question of me today.

While we strive to innovate in every area during normal times, it is the unexpected that should bring out the best in any company. These are the times when you either transform and challenge yourself and your staff or you become the next company in the heap of failures like Kodak, whose board said that digital cameras were a passing fad. Every department at Aggressor Adventures is issued the challenge: “What are you changing today?” We all understand the need for continuous evolution, and now is the time to be as creative as possible.

When the pandemic started, I realized early on that not only did we need internal operational policies and guidelines on how to create an even more sanitized and clean environment for our guests, but also that it was very likely that most, if not all, of our destinations would be setting their own guidelines for tourist businesses to reopen that we must comply with. We created a deep database of 30-plus documents detailing every area we were stepping up our strengths in sanitizing, disinfecting and preventing the spread of illnesses. Our documents are so encompassing and in-depth that when they were presented by each destination as their reopening plan, the local government accepted them without question.

With any group travel, there is no fool-proof plan to prevent the spread of an illness. That said, we understand the need to mitigate that potential as much as possible. From eliminating self-serve buffets to staggered briefings, we have looked at every approach we could logistically implement.

Our “Return to Service Guide” is six pages long, and this guide only highlights different areas, which themselves reference another one to seven multipage documents. Not only do we include new guidelines and practices for cleaning, disinfecting and sanitizing but also operational policies and procedures if a guest or staff become ill during an adventure. We also had challenges finding effective sanitizing and disinfecting chemicals in some of our more remote destinations. Breaking down the safety data sheet for the recommended products to the individual chemical level, we were able to source locally or provide a supplier that could ship to the destination.

This culminated in training the staff on the new procedures and assuring their understanding and correct implementation. With time-zone differences, language barriers and unreliable internet, we faced more hurdles to overcome these obstacles, but successfully found workarounds to accomplish them.

Having months with no guests arriving is never the ideal business model, but we took this disruption and turned it into a program of its own called “Clean, Refresh & Sanitize” (CRS), which we have permanently adopted as a normal course of business. While we have always scheduled multi-week remodel/upgrade/rebuild periods every two years, we also schedule maintenance weeks every six months for more extensive work that cannot be performed during operational weeks. Taking our learnings from the CRS program, we have incorporated this into these weeks to ensure that sanitizing and disinfecting is a major part of the scheduled work.

The pandemic also has had us look into our guest travel itinerary even before they leave home. With most countries requiring testing prior to travel, we researched best practices for scheduling a virus test and how to obtain one even when local access is not possible. Coupling this with local government protocols for arriving guests ensures that we are doing our best to prevent the spread of disease.

I am extremely proud of all the Staff at Aggressor Adventures and at every destination that we’ve taken on this task with enthusiasm and the understanding of its importance. We have tried our best to leave no stone unturned in what we can do to assure our guests of a clean, refreshed and sanitized Adventure of a Lifetime®.

Wayne B. Brown

CEO Aggressor Adventures

PADI Instructor 174820