I think the dad is over-reacting, and had a lot of blame on his own hands for, as he called it, ruining his own vacation.
Others have pointed out the assumptions the father made about the wristbands.
But it's equally important to point out that the wrist band, in its essential capacity, worked as designed. That is, it indicates that a child has passed a given checkpoint. The facts, had they had the wherewithal to check, would have indicated that:
* My child has checked in.
* My child has not checked out.
We are told the wristband was "UNREADABLE". It is open to debate, unless someone is intimately familiar with the wrist band system in question, what, precisely this means.
Even if the wristband became inoperable after check in, there is no requirement that the wristband to be properly functioning
at all times for DCL CMs to know that the child is where he is supposed to be! It would have had to be working to be checked in. If it doesn't work at check out, the old wristband should be replaced with one that does, and then the child should be checked out with that one.
So, as Sherlock Holmes would say, "having eliminated all other possibilities, the one that remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
Can a child escape? Can CMs mess up and allow a child to exit? Can children tailgate out? Sure, all of these are possibilities, but possibilities CMs are trained to manage, observe, and prevent. To assume the worst had happened without eliminating the obvious, was going too far, and we're not even 5 minutes into the search yet!
Secondly, there are many factual inaccuracies in the father's blog post. For one, it is not correct to state that they:
"[found] our child missing from their child care facility".
Now perhaps they were
led to believe that their child was missing from the facility... But, that's not what the dad said, and I think he would have if it was in fact what happened. This is perhaps the earliest point that we as parents can learn from. Do not jump to conclusions. Examine the situation, and behave rationally, for if this was an actual emergency, your child is depending on you to do so!
Thirdly, he ignored evidence that supported the reality of the situation:
"I spotted two of his friends and asked if theyd seen him. They said he was there someplace".
It turns out his friends were right, but this evidence and testimony was downplayed in the panic, perhaps because of the fear of the worst, perhaps because it was offered by children. Lesson for us parents is, make yourself available to listen for truth, no matter what the source!
Fourth, he ceded to others his responsibility to find his child. Why was he so quick to consider searching for his own child to be a hassle? Why was he annoyed in the search? I found it fun to sneak up on my son to see where he was, what he was doing? It makes me wonder if the state of mind of the father could have had a material impact on his perspective of the possibilities he was willing to consider?
He states:
"I began looking under draped compartments, behind obstacles, anywhere a child might hide."
Here I think lurks another lesson: Leave no stone unturned, and do not leave the task to well meaning strangers. What voice do children most reliably respond to? Those of the parent! Do not abandon the search where all of the evidence is telling you your child is! The father says he looked "anywhere" a child might hide, but clearly he did not search "everywhere".
Now a fair point to debate might be whether or not it should be necessary to conduct such a thorough search, but if I recall, we were talking about a 3 year old boy in a strange new environment? Are we really surprised he found a cranny and took a nap somewhere quiet and dark?
Fifth, and most damning to his case of who ruined his wife's vacation, I think this father could have been a better husband. The way he tells it:
"I took a moment to call my wife and asked her to come over immediately because they couldnt find our son!"
What a horrible place to put your wife! Her only view into what is happening is how you present the situation to her. Assess your situation, and state the facts. "Hey honey, I need your help. I can't find DS in the kids club, and I could use your help to track him down. Can you drop DD off with your friends, and help me call out to him? His friends said he is here somewhere, and I'm starting to worry!"
But instead of remedying that apparently frantic call with his wife, when she did arrive:
"My wife had shown up by this time and was understandably distraught but there was no time for me to console her."
No time to console? You haven't even done your dear wife the service of explaining what precisely you know, what you don't know, and what you could do-- together-- to eliminate more of the unknowns! You know children have seen him. Do you know when? Do you know where? What was his state of mind? Were there any adults around? Was he hanging out with other children? A key source of important facts was overlooked as the parent delved into full panic mode!
Another lesson for us parents to try to keep in mind when such horrid events unfold for us: Bring presence of mind to your communications with your loved and trusted ones. Explain what you know, what you don't know, and what you could do together to eliminate the "fog of war"!
As this poor father relates:
"One look at the terror on my wifes face and the pleading look in her eyes told me he was still missing. I shook my head and she began to sob, calling out for help. I will never forget that moment.
I was forced to turn my back on her and head the other way to continue the search for our son."
I find this statement hard not to be judgmental about. The terror on his wife's face was as much, if not more, his doing, than any kind of poor process, procedure, willful or accidental behavior of DCL CMs. He chose to turn his back on his own wife to follow the folly of his random and desperate search!
"In a display of heartlessness, none of the employees offered her sympathy or consolation. They literally turned their backs on her and acted like she was irrational and overreacting, leaving her there alone sobbing and shaking."
I've been on several DCL cruises. I've seen the "twentysomethings" that staff these locations. They are kind, generous, if young and perhaps not the best "crisis management experts". They are essentially well-trained baby sitters, not Search And Rescue experts that do well in a ground-zero situation, nor should they be! It's their job to make sure the wristbands get checked, that hands get washed, that parents provide the proper password, not to provide psychological counseling to a wife who was, by the accounts of this understandably upset father, left to twist in the wind as he desperately, and naively searched obscure and unnecessary parts of the ship when the facts of the matter indicated a much more likely place for him to search and to enlist the help of his wife.
Sixth, the response that this father requested from DCL staff was fully disproportionate to the actual risk that the situation entailed. According to his own testimony, staff had been alerted to the possibility of a child that could have possibly escaped from the club. That doesn't mean all staff, on a ship of hundreds, if not a thousand employees, having those that have the training and wherewithal to search for a child would seem to be adequate! Certainly the people who dutifully check key to the world cards at the gangplanks know, at the risk of being fired, that they must check every single person off or on with a key to the world card!
The lesson for us to take away from this is to realize that while it might be reasonable for us to think of making such an announcement, officials will not induce a panic in public venues. Our goal as parents ought to be to help the officials quickly eliminate all reasonable efforts, so they can begin to realize that the only remaining choices are to take extreme steps. Had this happened, had the father literally left no stone unturned, CMs would probably have responded to his needs more promptly, but at that point, it likely would have been unnecessary.
I understand a missing child is scary, but frankly, it's not an emergency until it's been clearly identified as an emergency. It turns out this was not an emergency. It turns out that if someone should be apologizing, it's this parent for creating a panic, when none was warranted. If an announcement had gone out, and people started to question "hey, is that your kid?" to a father about to disembark from the ship with a crying child, what exactly has your panic wrought? I'd be furious if someone challenged me about whether the crying toddler on the gangplank was actually my child, that a public broadcast would have a potential to generate! Next thing you know, you'd have false citizens arrests of every parent with a crying child, all because of one parent's panic.
The father then begins assuming the worst about no announcement being sent. How would the employee have known that the announcement had gone out if it hadn't? Wouldn't the proper response have been "I see no announcement on my wave phone sir, let me send one now!".
And excuse me if I don't think the criteria for sounding the amber alert alarm isn't simply "if a child is not found on a single spurious pass of the kids club, every single CM on the ship should be given a priority 1 alert".
Again, we can learn from this. In situations like this, we must strive to work within the system to enlist and engage the staff to begin going through their process as quickly as possible to reach that point of creating an announcement, starting, of course, with what the facts of the situation were clearly indicating: that the child is still in the club!
"Later that evening, someone came to our room with a bottle of wine and a printed apology card."
Another lesson: When you've been banging the drum to create a panic, what's appropriate is a letter of gratitude, and apology to the staff. This entire missive is such a classic example of "First World Problems" (ruined cruise! I want a full refund!) it's jaw-dropping!
"How had our son been able to craw away and fall asleep without anyone noticing?"
You try being one of a dozen counselors to dozens of sugar-induced children lacking any parental oversight and keeping tabs of every single child for every single minute!
"Why were the employees unable to find him for nearly 45 minutes?"
Is it remotely possible that they reacted too strongly to his panic? The real question is, why wasn't he able to find his own child after a thorough and complete search of the facility after ten minutes? Why expect a stranger to do a more thorough job than you did?
"Why was his security band unreadable?"
His security band was readable when it needed to be. It got him checked into the facility. If it failed to check him out, he would have been issued a new one.
"Why did everyone ignore my wife and make her feel so alone and terrified?"
Yes, indeed. Seems like the proper place to start this inquiry is with her husband.
"Why did none of the ships crew seem to be aware there was a missing child, despite the wave phone message which seemed to be their primary form of communication?"
Because the people at the gangway are trained to not allow missing children from departing the ship. They don't need to be alerted to that situation because they know to look for it. Because they would have immediately known his KTTWC was not showing him off ship. Because the people at Guest Services aren't going to drop everything, leave their posts and search the kids club. All of these should be obvious to anyone except those under the mistaken expectation that a full ship search is warranted even by janitorial staff who are off duty, and every man woman and child on the ship! I get that you might think this is the case in a panic, but two months after the fact? Get a grip!
"Why was no announcement made on the ship at any point?"
Clearly, an announcement was made to the people who needed to know. And because of the actions of this understandably desperate father, the announcement was probably made wider than the situation might have even warranted.
"Most importantly, why was there no apparent protocol in the event of a missing child considering this is Disney, a world-class organization that builds its reputation on the happiness of children?"
Having no
apparent protocol and having
no protocol at all are two different things.
"We felt that there were too many things that went wrong for us to simply accept a bottle of wine and a printed apology card. We wanted to make sure someone in charge knew about these problemswe wanted to speak with the Captain."
The Captain was surely made aware of the situation and probably saw it as clearly as several of those on this board do: That while this is clearly upsetting for the father and mother, the response of the parents were actually a detriment to quickly finding the child. If anything, the Captain and Cruise Director had an after-action report that included instructions on how to conduct an absolutely thorough search. To assume Disney did nothing about this is to underestimate the level of detail and dedication these professionals have about their jobs.
"So I made a call and asked to meet with the Captain, at his earliest convenience, to discuss what had happened."
Perhaps this father is under the impression that he's on the love boat and Captain Stubing has nothing better to do than to meet with (unnecessarily?) distraught guests that a member of his senior, non operational staff is unable to console. As a DCL cruiser, I'm glad the captain is deciding that this doesn't warrant his attention as a member of the executive operational staff who is responsible for the safety of thousands of people! I'd rather he conduct his shift, then retire to his room and rest so he can wake up rested, and then conduct his next shift, considering the awesome responsibility he is given, an order of magnitude greater than given to airline pilots!
"My primary intention was to help them better understand what went wrong, identify things that could be improved, and the overall way the issue was handled."
The irony here is palpable. The father is completely unable to see his part in creating the panic in his wife; unable to see the panic he caused while expecting others to have miraculously solve a problem that largely laid in his domain! If anything, Disney was able to keep the proper perspective, focus on where the problem actually lay, and could have been resolved far more effectively if the parents caused the CMs to focus on the facts, and not to feats of amazing desperation and unrealistic expectations.
And frankly, I think they understood the proper action items they needed to take more than this father did!
"During the meeting, I made it clear that while we were relieved that our son was eventually located, he HAD been missing for 45 minutes while in their care."
Again, another inaccurate statement of the facts. He was NOT missing for 45 minutes. His location was affirmatively known by the people who last saw him (in the club) and the record of his wristband indicated, properly, that he had checked in and not checked out. His precise location was unknown for 45 minutes, which is distinctly different from "missing for 45 minutes" as if he could have been anywhere on the ship, or worse (assuming to his visit to the gangplank) that he could have been taken off-ship in a foreign country!
"The fact that he was found didnt change the apparent lack of a clear plan to find him, or the lack of urgency exhibited by the cruise staff."
This assumes far too much. An
apparent lack of a clear plan, and an
apparent lack of urgency does not indicate that DCL staff
actually lack a plan, and
actually didn't respond to this incident with the proper and appropriate concern!
"What happened essentially ruined her birthday and spoiled the entire trip for her."
I find it odd that this statement leads to the conclusion that the birthday was ruined due to the willful or negligent actions of DCL employees. That is not my conclusion, which leaves the father in a far less flattering light than he perhaps thinks he is in. It leaves DCL staff in a much better light, particularly not hearing the story from even their perspective, which we likely never will as Disney would not likely disparage the actions of a guest unless they had their hand forced in court.
He closes by suggesting that nobody offered any apologies, when in fact they did. That they didn't do it in person, at the time and place of their choosing belies the fact that, perhaps, the Cruise Director needed to be on stage at the WD theater at the time? Or perhaps he realized there was no apology that he could offer that would suffice, short of a free cruise, and thus the appropriate response was to state that corporate would handle it from there?
To me, the fact that Disney offered a two day park pass is going above and beyond what DCL should have ever had to do.
This father assumes that his son was lost, when he was not. This father assumed there was a poor response, but that is not apparent either. He states this was a "crisis aboard ship", but that seems a bit overstated to me. As a parent, yes, I would be distraught, but calling my inability to find my son in a club where he crawled into some dimly lit area would lead me to other conclusions.
The "uncaring, calculated corporate response afterward" is exactly what I'd expect from a company if I was so blind to all of the reasonable explanations of what happened, to the part I played in manufacturing a crisis when I could have been part of the solution and a hero to my wife by finding my son moments after realizing he had managed to hide out somewhere.
Anyone who concludes from this story that Disney can justly and properly be concluded to be associated with the "horrific experience of losing our child and a serious lack of customer service" is putting too much faith into one unfortunate family's experiences and not walking away with lessons learned of
what not to do in such a stressful situation.
My heart goes out to this family, but my advice to them would be to call back Disney corporate, apologize for overreacting, and ask if they could donate those tickets to Make a Wish foundation or some other charity. If this situation is so traumatic that they would swear off all future Disney experiences, then I suspect this family is going to be jumping from crisis to crisis in many untold situations where "well that sucked, but how can we learn from it" is the proper response, not a self-righteous and embarrassing rant on one's blog.
Final point of perspective (and thanks for reading this far). This is my first post at Disboards. (As some say "long time reader, first time poster") My wife, an avid reader of this board, made me aware of this "debacle", and after reading his story, I couldn't help but comment with my perspective, which I hope helps some parent keep their wits when their kids need it the most. Often its hard as a parent to hear that our actions made a situation worse, or could have made it better if we had acted differently. We must embrace such opportunities because they are the ones that can help us react in ways that can frankly be life saving and life changing reactions.
