Karen Mazurkewich is vice-president of stakeholder relations and communications at Toronto Pearson. This opinion piece originally appeared at Fast Company.
Snow, cold, misery—this season reminded us how tough North American winters can be. But you might also remember the winter of 2022-23, when a whopping December “bomb cyclone” nearly broke the aviation industry’s fragile post-COVID recovery.
The Southwest Airlines scheduling network melted down. Airlines canceled thousands of flights, a move that cascaded across the United States and Canada.
I work at Toronto Pearson, one of the best-equipped winter airports around, but our experience that Christmas week was anything but merry. Toronto and surrounding areas faced 50-knot wind gusts and got more than 30 inches of snow over a few days, as highways closed and trains were stranded on the tracks. Buffalo’s airport, just an hour down the road, was shuttered for days.
Our operations team, plows and deicing facility did heroic work to keep Toronto Pearson open. But in the news, we took the blame and became a face for the wider system’s problems.
The Canadian national media corps is based in Toronto, and they localized our struggles rather than focusing on the broader story. Delays and cancellations everywhere separated arriving and transiting passengers from their luggage, and the bags piled up, becoming a magnet for TV cameras.
Then, an airline ground crew left a door open and froze a baggage belt. The service outage lasted a few hours but was misreported as an ongoing problem for days.
One outlet published a critical story about us—but featured a photo of baggage stacked at another airport.
A playbook built for difficulty
The experience was so challenging that it forced us to reinvent our entire media strategy, but I’m glad we did. Three years later, that strategy has helped us reclaim our reputation and given us a playbook to share. Here’s what we learned.
1. Take back social media
Misinformation runs wild on social media, especially on the most viral platforms—ahem, X—and we found that even well-meaning posts could mislead reporters and result in poor media coverage.
Our team spent countless hours that winter calling reporters and editors to correct mistakes and change misleading headlines, and surveys showed a 17-point reputation gap between recent passengers, who thought we were doing well, and those who had not been to the airport recently.
To take back social, we separated our channels and flooded them with relevant stories we wanted to tell: Marketing on Instagram, influencers on TikTok, customer service on Facebook and operational updates and education on X, with a special emphasis on weather.
We also persuaded our airline and agency partners to communicate more proactively about their service interruptions.
2. Hire former journalists
Marketing and comms roles have few formal professional qualifications, and we’ve hired great people from many backgrounds. But for media relations, we’ve doubled down on newsroom experience.
Our airport now has three former broadcasters, two former newspaper people (including me), and a former digital news editor on staff. The team knows what news is, how to talk to reporters, and where the land mines are.
3. Correct the incorrect
Our team’s experience means they aren’t afraid to speak up. Uncorrected misinformation gets repeated, so you have to push back.
Our media team regularly calls newsrooms to request headline changes or explain how things really work. We also write op-eds and letters to get our side of the story across—and when we can’t land one, we use paid media.
4. Promote the heroes
In media relations and our owned content, we try to highlight and leverage the airport workers who keep passengers moving safely.
Last year, we brought in a documentary crew to produce a behind-the-scenes series on winter operations for National Geographic. In 2024, we partnered with a local TV station to put our airport duty managers on live TV to talk about the weather and the day ahead.
When the next big storm season hit, we were ready
This playbook has worked wonders. The tweets and comments are kinder. Our sentiment scores are up 8 percentage points since early 2023.
And we’re seeing fewer frivolous stories. After the Christmas storm, TV crews would rush out whenever it snowed. They’d watch for delays to hit the board, look for lines to form and prompt passengers to complain. But their habit of seeking this story was finally broken.
This past 2025–2026 winter set records at Toronto Pearson. January was our snowiest month since 1937. We set a personal best record for deicing. And one recent weekend, a huge storm swept across North America, with effects reverberating around the system. We got 18 inches of snow in an 18-hour window, and 65% of flights were cancelled. Sound familiar?
Three years ago, we would have dreaded the coverage. Not this time. Instead of giving reporters unrestricted access to the terminal, we took them outside to see the snow clearing. Our spokesman, a former TV reporter, did live interviews from the airfield with plows and tractors, and a melter worked behind him.
A video interview with our CEO, wearing a safety vest at the maintenance facility, was viewed 115,000 times online. Our owned content racked up 3.98 million impressions across social channels.
This resulted in fairly balanced airport-delay coverage, including stories about our preparation and efforts to keep flights moving safely. What a difference three years—and the right strategy—made.