Long Haul recovery, staff recruitment & retention – a look at what 2023 has in store for the aviation industry & Bostonair from our Managing Director.
Bostonair’s Managing Director of Aviation – Andrew Parker, reflects on the successes of 2022 and what’s in store for 2023…
Happy New Year to all our customers and of course to the great people that work for Bostonair, whether at HQ or ‘in the field’ at the client site.
2022 is best described as a year of partial recovery, after most areas of the commercial aviation/aerospace market saw strong bounce back bringing load factors, yields and aircraft utilisation edging closer to pre-pandemic levels, most evidently in the European markets.
For the teams at Bostonair during this recovery year, we have invested significant time in talking to our clients and ensuring we are in step with their anticipated demand for our services. In parallel we have further invested in an additional “Resourcing” function within our back-office team designed to ensure we have a pipeline supply of suitable candidates to meet our diverse clients expected future needs.
2022 has also seen us open a recruitment office in both Singapore and Australia, and we have welcomed new customers accordingly in the APAC region. Likewise, we have further diversified our service offerings during the pandemic and now have a stable, highly experienced and well utilised Team of Auditors/Security/Safety experts working on behalf of 6 airline clients across UK/Europe/Middle East.
Looking forwards to what lies ahead in 2023, the first industry positive has come recently with China’s change in COVID policy, and assuming there is no return to restrictions across the globe, the Long-Haul market should now recover quite quickly, albeit perhaps with less business travel spend given changing working habits since the pandemic.
Aside from the cost-of-living crisis that is affecting much of us, and of course, the ongoing Ukraine war which doesn’t look like it’s ending anytime soon sadly, the broadest challenge that we foresee is one of recruitment and retention of staff across the Aviation/Aerospace sector.
With the required ‘deep cuts’ in resource during COVID, combined with the fact that many previously ‘resilient’ aviation staff have permanently left the industry and the quicker than anticipated travelling public bounce back – the whole Aviation infrastructure, from Airports, to Airlines to MRO’s have felt massive strain and have often had to resort to mass cancellations in order to protect the robustness of the remaining core operation. The global air cargo market which had seen strong growth during the pandemic but is now forecast (by IATA) to see single digit contraction during 2023 and is often an early warning signal to a more broadly challenging set of market conditions.
All that aside, the team at Bostonair enter 2023 with an optimistic and driven mindset. We have successfully navigated through the pandemic now with a broader suite of services to offer the industry, serving a more globally diverse client base, with a growing pipeline of industry talent (despite the prevailing job market) and from mid-2023 we’ll be deploying a new industry leading CRM system, that will ensure we deliver to our customer’s needs even more quickly than we do right now.
We look forward to partnering with you all on your journeys through 2023, no doubt it will fly by again.
Andy
