Adrian is Vice President of Response Support at GoCrisis. He is part of the GoCrisis team that ensures our clients are supported and remain closely connected with us throughout our partnership. With 27 years experience in mitigating risk for businesses in a variety of industries such as agriculture, logistics, insurance and aviation, Adrian is passionate about engaging with our clients to help ensure their business is prepared for any possible crisis event.
Bob Palestrant has over 40 years of experience serving as a registered nurse, firefighter/paramedic, emergency manager, and in the discipline of homeland security. He is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) through the International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM), a credentialed Chief Fire Officer (CFO) through the Center of Public Safety Excellence and earned his master’s degree in Homeland Security from American Military University.
He was the Director of the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security for Miami-Dade County, Florida, coordinating multi-agency and multi-jurisdictional responses to disasters and large-scale emergencies, and as a member of a coalition of Emergency Managers from the 11 largest U.S. cities, worked with the Council of Excellence in Government to standardize and improve methods of increasing the preparedness and the ability of cities to respond to disasters on a national basis.
Bob has been instrumental in multiple activations including several major hurricanes, Superbowls XLI and XLIV, multiple mass casualty incidents, aviation disasters and mass shootings. As a member of the Florida Task Force 1 Urban Search and Rescue Team, he was on several deployments including the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.
As the Southeast Florida Fusion Center Terrorism Liaison Officer Program Coordinator, he served on multiple regional, state, and national homeland security-related committees and work groups. He is certified as an Incident Command System (ICS), instructor, and Office for Bombing Prevention (OBP) Bomb Making Materials Awareness Program (BMAP) Administrator/Trainer. He has received multiple service awards and honors, and in 2021, was selected as the Government Technology & Services Coalition-Homeland Security Today’s State Homeland Security Person of the Year.
Bob was a technical consultant for the show “Without Warning,” broadcast on both The Discovery and The Learning Channels and has been a panel member or given presentations on emergency management, aircraft rescue and firefighting, and homeland security issues at multiple conferences and symposiums across the country and internationally.
John Bailey has spent more than 25 years helping companies around the world to prepare for, and respond to, reputation challenges and crises. He is the author of the Best Practice Guidelines on Crisis Communication and Reputation Management in the Digital Age, published by the International Air Transport Association. This is the definitive guide for the global aviation industry on adapting crisis response plans to meet the challenge of an “always on” media environment.
John offers an unrivalled breadth of international experience, having worked with more than 100 clients in over 50 countries, including more than 60 airlines. He has also worked with several major hotel groups, including Accor, Hilton, IHG, Kempinski and Minor Hotels and more broadly with clients across the travel industry.
Before he moved back to Europe and joined GoCrisis, John built the largest independently-owned Public Relations agency in Singapore, which was acquired by Ketchum in November 2013. John previously worked in Geneva, Switzerland, where he created the successful IATA Crisis Communications consultancy service.
He has been involved in the response to numerous crisis situations, including several airline accidents and the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. More recently, he was part of the team advising the senior management of Malaysia Airlines on their response to the disappearance of flight MH370, a crisis unprecedented in aviation history. He also worked extensively with AirAsia Group, before and after the loss of flight QZ8501 in December 2014.
John is a regular speaker at conferences around the world and has been a guest lecturer at various universities in Asia and Europe and at the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Training Center in Ashburn, Virginia.
Barbara Webster is Executive Vice President at GoCrisis, overseeing North America, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Barbara is a renowned Crisis, Family Assistance, and Business Continuity expert. She was most recently the Senior Director of Emergency Response and Business Continuity at Spirit Airlines for nine years before joining GoCrisis. She has over 30 years of experience in the field of emergency management, which began in the oil & gas sector in Canada. Prior to her career at Spirit Airlines in Florida, she successfully developed and led WestJet Airlines’ Emergency Response and Family Assistance programs for nine years in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
She has extensive domestic and international response experience which includes a fatal hotel explosion in Playa del Carmen Mexico and aviation accidents in Tripoli, Libya and Dillingham, Alaska. She has also responded to numerous aircraft-related incidents, a tall ship sinking off the coast of Brazil with high school students, three mass shootings, and multiple hurricanes requiring full facility evacuations. Barbara also led Spirit’s partnership with Operation Puerto Rico Care-Lift, where she coordinated over 160 tons of relief supplies to Puerto Rico during the 2017/18 Hurricane Season.
Barbara is a citizen of both the United States and Canada, and is currently based out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She is one of the Founding Board Members and former Chair of AERO, the Aviation Emergency Response Organization, and has provided guidance to air carriers and airports around the world.
Elmarie Marais is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of GoCrisis. When she founded the company, her vision was simple: to build an organisation with global reach, that can provide excellent regional support at rapid speed with the best people. She started with the people she’d responded alongside in her career – those with the best front-line crisis experience, can-do attitude and those who uphold the company values of diversity and inclusiveness. Today, she is proud to lead the most experienced, diverse and passionate crisis management team in the world.
Her career in crisis management began in London where she managed a UK Government initiative to develop a Business Continuity Toolkit for London businesses to prepare, respond and recover from the aftermath of a disaster. Following that, she worked for several years for a global disaster response company in the UK, of which she later was a Company Director in Australia.
With over 18 years’ experience in crisis and emergency management, she has worked with global brands (including FTSE 100 companies), assisted multiple sector organisations (aviation, oil and gas, mining, bus and rail, maritime, manufacturing, education etc), NGOs and governments to review their corporate crisis management plans, build their crisis response capacity and trained crisis leaders. Her work has supported some companies to become leaders in their industry with their approach to organisational resilience.
She has extensive front-line crisis and disaster response experience having responded to aviation accidents, natural disasters (fires, tsunami, cyclones, pandemics), high profile corporate crises, political unrest, corporate evacuations, mass product recalls and data breaches.
Elmarie believes strongly in giving back and is an Incident Commander for the Red Cross where she has led interstate humanitarian responses to natural disaster, involving multiple evacuation centres.
Her passion for emergency and crisis management started in the aviation industry where she travelled the world as Senior Cabin Crew while she completed her Bachelor of Commerce degree, later studying Disaster Response and Relief at Harvard University.
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