On February 20 of this year, Scenic Group was subject to a cyber attack, which caused issues with guest pre-travel documentation and customer service overall. The company overcame the challenges by completely rebuilding its IT systems and is now able to provide top-tier services to its customers once again.

According to a statement by company founder Glen Moroney, the hackers who took control of Scenic’s systems demanded a ransom, and he decided to refuse to pay it and enable these criminals to continue hacking other businesses.

Yet, stronger measures had to be taken.

Despite the initial projection of a short reboot lasting up to three weeks following the attack, the company chose a total system rebuild that took more than nine weeks. They were able to keep all guest data secure and leak-free thanks to this process.

Although communication with guests and industry partners was nearly impossible, and call center times were impacted by the incident, Scenic Group has changed dramatically since then. Since the company is still dealing with a massive backlog, they have hired additional staff to deal with the return to full operations, as well as established a dedicated support team to handle the administrative tasks for each reservation.

Moroney further noted that some regions have seen an unprecedented level of flight rescheduling and late flight cancellations – even on the day of departure, resulting in a significant volume of incoming calls to the customer contact center.

Scenic’s pre-departure document issuance is now approaching the pre-cyber attack timeframe, and average wait times for the customer contact center have “decreased dramatically”, Moroney commented.