Fred Olsen Cruise Lines is hoping to re-employ some of the staff it had to make redundant as a result of the Covid pandemic, once operations resume.
The Ipswich-based cruise line confirmed around a third of its 220 head office employees were made redundant earlier this month.
Speaking on a Travel Weekly webcast, managing director Peter Deer said: “It’s been an extremely sad time. Some of these people have worked with me, and for me, for a long, long time and sadly, we’ve had to lose them.
“What I do hope going forward, however, is that there are chances for longer term re-employment when the industry gets in a much more stable state, and we’re cruising again and things are going well, and we realise there are gaps in our restructuring.”
Deer continued: “We’ve done some quite radical things to reduce our overall headcount, but we can hopefully then look at where we’ve got the gaps and then look to the teams who were working with us – the people – and say, ‘Great, we can hopefully find work for those people again’. That’s what I’d really like to do. But it won’t be for everyone, sadly.”
He said the decision to restructure was one which he tried to put off.
“It was something I tried to park for as long as I possibly could to see if we could see some light at the end of the tunnel, so we could avoid some of this,” Deer explained.
“But in reality, during this period of lay-up and pause of operations, every cruise line has haemorrhaged an enormous amount of cash. So, when we go back into service, whenever that may be, someone’s got to pay this debt back somehow.
Deer said his job was to “run our operations as efficiently as possible” and explained that he “sat down in every area of the business” to ask tell his team ‘We’ve got look at everything we do and almost take it back to a zero base’.
He added: “We said if we were going to build it from scratch and we’re going to buy a pencil, what pencil would we buy? And they said, well we wouldn’t buy the luxury one over there, we’d buy it over there. And it’s the same with what we’ve had to do with staffing and with contracts, we’ve had to slowly (and we’re still doing it) migrate it downwards to then build back on that.”
He said his intention to re-employ staff extended to crew as well as head office.
“Our crew went home to different regions – whether they were European or Asia-based. We employ a lot of people from the Philippines and India, and we’re in contact with them through our agents over there and we really want them to come back to our brand,” he said.
“They work really well for us and now we’ve got these new ships – and we know they’re aware of them – we’ve been talking to them and they they’re willing to come back. They say they have a good experience if working for Fred Olsen Cruise Lines. We have a certain family attitude to the way we do things right from Fred himself, to me and right through all the teams and we care for the people we employ.
Deer added: “It would be great to get cruising again and bring these people back on board and see people I have not seen now for six months.”