Raal Harris, the founder of PitchFrame, brings readers details of an interesting session from last week’s Crew Connect Global in Manila.
We spend a lot of time in cargo shipping looking to aviation for inspiration in approaches to safety, technology, training and operational efficiency. But there’s another industry sitting much closer to home that perhaps deserves more of our attention: cruise.
At Crew Connect Global in Manila, I had the opportunity to explore this theme with four people who understand the cruise sector from very different perspectives: Eric Visser of Holland America Line and Seabourn, Anca Preda of Columbia Shipmanagement, Calypso Diareme of ATPI and Joost van Ree of Nevetal.
Our question was straightforward: what can cargo shipping actually learn from the way cruise manages its crew, and particularly from the technology that supports it?
The discussion revealed some important differences, but also some surprisingly transferable lessons. And while cruise may be further ahead in certain aspects of crew management technology, the most interesting differences aren’t necessarily the systems themselves. They’re what those systems enable organisations to do.
Different scale, different challenges
We should start by acknowledging that cruise and cargo operate under very different conditions.
Eric Visser explained that Holland America Line and Seabourn employ around 16,000 people across their fleet, with between 10 and 40 crew joining or leaving individual vessels almost every day. A large cruise ship might carry 1,000 or even 2,000 crew, compared with perhaps 20 to 25 on a typical cargo vessel.
Then there’s predictability.
Cruise operators can know 18 to 24 months in advance where their ships will be, often down to the hour. That makes workforce planning, crew changes and training considerably easier to organise than in cargo shipping, where schedules and port calls are subject to disruption at a moment’s notice.
But scale and predictability aren’t the only differences.
Cruise ships have entire departments dedicated to HR, training and employee welfare. They manage complex workforces covering everything from navigation and engineering to hospitality, entertainment and catering. And the people working in those departments are directly responsible for delivering the product that customers have paid for.
As Eric memorably put it, “Our cargo talks back to us.”
A passenger’s experience is shaped by the people they encounter, and poor performance can translate almost immediately into customer dissatisfaction and reputational damage that impacts the bottom line.
That creates a very visible commercial incentive to invest in the workforce.
Cargo shipping has equally important dependencies on the competence, wellbeing and performance of its seafarers, but the relationship with commercial performance is often less immediate and less visible.
This distinction helps explain why cruise has developed some of its approaches to crew management. It also raises the first important question for cargo: are we giving our people the strategic attention their contribution deserves?
Building a workforce, not just filling vacancies
One of the most interesting distinctions Eric made concerned the relationship between ship operators and the organisations that supply their crew.
In his organisation, they don’t refer to manning agents. They call them talent partners.
That might sound like a cosmetic change, but the thinking behind it is significant.
A traditional crewing transaction starts with a vacancy. The operator needs a third engineer, the agency identifies a qualified candidate, and that person joins the ship.
In cruise, Eric described a much more continuous relationship, where the recruitment partner shares responsibility for supporting the seafarer throughout their employment, including their wellbeing, development and career progression.
“We’re really building a workforce rather than that we are building a portfolio of people,” he explained.
The distinction is important. One approach is principally concerned with meeting today’s crewing requirements. The other is concerned with developing the people and capabilities the organisation will need tomorrow.
Anca Preda reinforced this point, explaining that cruise has developed a much broader maritime HR function, with greater emphasis on employee engagement, employer branding, talent development and retention.
“We don’t look at talent attraction as an administrative function,” she told us.
Of course, a cargo vessel cannot accommodate a dedicated onboard HR department. But Anca argued that this needn’t prevent cargo operators from adopting the underlying approach. These responsibilities can be managed from shore, provided the organisation establishes the right relationships, processes and accountability.
This is perhaps the first genuinely transferable lesson. Strategic workforce management doesn’t depend on having thousands of employees on a vessel. It depends on recognising that recruitment, development, deployment and retention are connected activities rather than separate administrative tasks.
What the data tells us about people
Of course planning and coordination at this scale require technology and data that can support a more strategic approach.
Eric offered an excellent example.
His organisation had experienced turnover of around 30% within one group of officers. The natural assumption was that remuneration was the problem.
But when they examined the available workforce information, they discovered that the more significant issue was a bottleneck in career progression. People couldn’t see a route to promotion.
Addressing that problem reduced turnover.
It’s a simple example, but an important one. Without the data, the organisation might have responded by increasing pay, potentially at considerable expense, without resolving the underlying issue.
Cruise operators are increasingly connecting information about recruitment, competence, training, career progression, deployment and retention to build a more complete picture of their workforce.
This also creates opportunities to take a more sophisticated approach to professional development.
Eric described how cross-training allows people to move between departments and progress through different roles. Rather than viewing an individual solely in terms of the job they currently perform, the organisation considers their existing competencies, their potential and the additional development needed to prepare them for another role.
Anca described exploring how AI might automate part of this process, comparing role requirements, identifying competency gaps and suggesting the training needed to support career progression.
That is a much more interesting application of AI than simply making existing administrative processes faster.
It could help organisations understand not only whether they have enough people, but whether they are developing the right capabilities for future requirements.
There is, however, an important prerequisite.
Joost van Ree pointed out that some cruise operators already have relatively mature data platforms, developed initially to support commercial functions such as reservations, finance and customer satisfaction. Connecting crew management, learning and other operational systems to those platforms creates opportunities for more predictive workforce planning.
Cargo shipping, by contrast, often still relies heavily on spreadsheets, PDFs and disconnected systems.
The challenge isn’t necessarily a lack of data. It’s the inability to bring that information together into something sufficiently reliable to support decisions.
And that matters even more as organisations begin to introduce AI. Predictive systems are only as useful as the information on which they depend.
When planning meets reality
Perhaps the most striking operational example came from Calypso Diareme, who works across both cruise and cargo crew logistics at ATPI.
She described the challenges of managing crew movements during the recent Middle East crisis.
ATPI had to arrange the evacuation of several thousand cruise crew, alongside much smaller numbers of cargo seafarers requiring changes to their travel arrangements.
According to Calypso, the cruise movements were completed within days, while some of the cargo movements took weeks.
The difference wasn’t simply the availability of technology.
Cruise operators had developed processes following COVID that allowed the various parties involved to work from connected information. They knew who needed to travel, what documentation those individuals held, which routes were available, who needed to be involved and what alternatives existed when plans changed.
In cargo, individual crew changes were more likely to be treated as separate cases, requiring people to gather information and coordinate arrangements afresh.
This is a particularly useful illustration of what digital maturity actually means.
A crew-change platform might optimise a travel itinerary, but that is of limited value if the crewing department, travel provider, port agent and vessel are working from different information.
Similarly, an algorithm might identify the ideal person for an assignment, but that doesn’t help much if the person cannot reach the ship.
The value comes from connecting the whole process, from workforce planning through to successful embarkation, and ensuring that people can respond effectively when something goes wrong.
Technology enables that coordination, but it cannot substitute for the processes, relationships and human judgement needed to make it work.
For cargo operators, where crew changes are often less predictable, that capability may be particularly valuable.
Don’t copy cruise. Learn from it.
There is a temptation, when looking at a more technologically mature operation, to assume that the answer is to acquire the same systems, but that is not necessarily the case.
Cruise operators have scale, operational characteristics and commercial incentives that can justify investments which would make little sense for many cargo fleets.
And cruise itself isn’t a single model. Expedition vessels, river cruise operators and smaller luxury ships face different challenges from the largest ocean-going cruise vessels.
Joost’s closing advice was particularly sensible: “Don’t overspend chasing cruise-level solutions.”
The opportunity is to adopt the principles that make those solutions effective, rather than replicate their complexity.
That might mean connecting existing workforce data before investing in new AI applications. It might mean developing a clearer understanding of competency and promotion readiness rather than simply tracking training completion. Or it might mean redesigning crew-change processes so that information can move reliably between the organisations involved.
It also means giving maritime HR a stronger voice in operational and commercial decision-making.
As Eric argued, HR should be regarded as a strategic partner in the development of the business, not simply the function responsible for supplying people.
None of this requires cargo shipping to become more like cruise in its wider operating model.
It requires us to think differently about how we use technology to manage, support and develop the people on whom our operations depend.
My biggest takeaway from the discussion was that cruise’s advantage isn’t simply that it has more sophisticated technology. In many cases, it has developed a more connected approach to workforce management, supported by better information, clearer processes and a stronger understanding of the commercial value of its people.
And that is something cargo shipping can learn from, regardless of fleet size.