Have ships managed to get their own crews back?

[Rob Lightbody]

I was watching some Youtube videos yesterday, and some of the recent Cunard reviews are saying standards have slipped and things are different recently - some of the videos were very recent.

It made me wonder - have ships managed to get their own crews back, or have they just got "any" crew?

For Cunard and their "white star service" I'd imagine they would actually want Cunard-trained staff back, but will they have managed that?

[skilly56]

Cunard are sailing, but cannot obtain full crews so pax numbers on the ships are reduced accordingly.

[Lynda Bradford]

When I was on QE in January, I recognised and spoke to many Cunard crew who were on the ship. 

I have read the recent crew shortages has resulted in passengers having their cruise cancelled but the cruise going ahead with reduced passenger numbers.

This was posted in a Facebook page from a passenger who had received an email notifying her that her cruise was cancelled. There were lots of discussions on what is causing the crew shortage by no conclusive answer. 

[Isabelle Prondzynski]

There seem to be staff shortage everywhere, including in shipping. Which adds to the supply chain problems. Covid has made many people rethink their working lives, and of course many people had to take up different jobs during the hiatus or decided to retire ("the great resignation").

After the abysmal way many seafarers were treated during the lockdowns, I cannot blame them for not wanting to go back, if they have the choice to do something else instead.

I heard yesterday that Lufthansa and Eurowings had cancelled 1,000 flights due to crew shortages.

Hotels and catering in Ireland also cannot get the staff they need. And car hire has become expensive, as the companies cannot get the cars they need (supply chain problems).

And in the UK (whispering...) Brexit adds to the problematic situation.

[cunardqueen]

I heard yesterday that Lufthansa and Eurowings had canceled 1,000 flights due to crew shortages.   

In most cases the airlines will know well in advance what flights are to be cancelled, how or if they pass the details on is another matter, but there is nothing worse than getting that email. My niece who just joined BA last week, a process that took from End of December till June    to complete, has her rota just under a month before travel and generally the rotas won't change. But the knockon effects of a 15 minute delay in take off simply snowball by the  end of their shift , and if theres no one to unload baggage at the other end , well there isnt much you can do, but its easier to mess about with domestic routes than long haul with the risk of crew being out of hours half way over the Atlantic . 

The railways, that's another matter again.   

[Peter Mugridge]

BA currently have a large number of Finnair and Iberia Airbus 320 / 321 aircraft on wet lease at the moment, despite a similar number of their own fleet still being stored.

A wet lease is when the aircraft is provided with a crew and all servicing etc included; this seems to suggest that BA has been unable to recover crew numbers quickly enough to meet demand following the removal of all virus restrictions and that tallies with all the stories about staff shortages being behind a lot of the recent chaos.

Of course, there are some factors which BA and others can do nothing about which don't help recruitment either...

[skilly56]

The airline my son works for was initially told by our gov't that they wouldn't be opening the borders until end of year.
Then they suddenly had a change of mind and announced unrestricted travel from September.

It caught or international airline out - all their 777 pilots & cabin staff had either been transferred to the little A-320 aircraft or made redundant. It takes the airline 2-3 months to retrain the pilots to fly the 777 again after 2 years, so the aircraft are all still sitting in the Californian deserts in storage, and will be until crews can get re-trained to bring them home.
Trying to get all the pilots through the simulators as quickly as possible is a nightmare.

My son is ok - he had less than 12 months off the 787s, flying domestic & trans-Tasman flights to Aussie with A-321s.
He now has two weeks off, then does a very short re-training before going back onto driving the Dreamliners.

A lot of ship's crew members found jobs ashore during Covid, and are now very reluctant to give those shore jobs up to go back to sea, just in case the Covid hits the shipping again and they get laid off again. Exactly the same thing happened in the Aussie Offshore industry in 2015 when the oil prices plummeted. Everyone got jobs ashore, and now don't want to go back to sea.