Swissport Global Chief Commercial Officer Guillaume Halleux sees consistency and technology as key to the company’s transformation mission, writes Graham Dunn
After a career of 25 years working in cargo roles across a number of carriers, most latterly as Chief Cargo Officer at Qatar Airways, Guillaume Halleux has plenty of experience of the challenges ground handlers face in consistently meeting airline demands.
Halleux is now seeing life from the other side as Swissport’s Global Chief Commercial Officer.
“I was one of their customers and one day chief executive and my now boss, Warwick Brady, called me and said, ‘stop complaining just join us and do it’,” he told ARGS, in his first interview since joining Swissport in September 2023.
“I joined Swissport because I could see as their customer that this company was undergoing a very big transformation. The Swissport you are talking about today has nothing to do with the Swissport of even two years ago,” he explained.
New owners took over the business at the end of 2020 and subsequently a fresh management team led by Brady was installed – of which Halleux is the latest addition. They were tasked with rebuilding Swissport from the ground up.
“We are doing just that,” Halleux said. “In the process we have grown again, after shrinking with Covid. We now cover roughly 300 airports in the world and we handle roughly 4 million flights. If Swissport was an airline, we would be by all metrics the largest airline in the world.”
Swissport boosted revenues by 11% to €3.7 billion (US$4.2 billion) in 2024. The strong revenue performance was achieved on a 6.5% increase in serving 247 million passengers last year, its highest number since before the pandemic, and a 6.4% rise in cargo tonnage handled.
That also includes strong growth of Swissport’s hospitality business, Aspire Executive Lounge, where it grew more than a quarter, with the addition of 22 locations last year. “It is a very important business line for us,” Halleux explained. “I picked it up when I joined Swissport. It was a bit of a forgotten child in the organisation. You will see us grow in that segment.”
One of Swissport’s missions has been to provide a consistency of service.
“We have created uniformity where it did not exist,” Halleux explained. “That was my main pitch to Swissport when I was a customer. This is an industry problem. How do you maintain consistency across the globe?”
Swissport’s approach has been to ensure there is accountability at station level. Halleux noted that while airlines tend to be very centralised with the lead coming from head office, there is much more responsibility at station level on the ground handling side. As a result, Swissport is decentralised: a company with 62,000 employees and a head office of about 80 people.
“We are a big machine that operates with a unique model, where every station is empowered and accountable for their service delivery and their financial profit,” he explained.
The push for consistency is underpinned by Swissport’s station manager manual. “This is the book, and you work by the book,” Halleux said. “The only deviations we tolerate are because they are customer requests and they must drive a higher standard than the book.”
The consistency challenge has been heightened by the industry-wide exodus from the sector of staff during Covid, which has created such wide-ranging recruitment and retention headaches in the post-pandemic years.
“As an industry we have lost a lot of people,” said Halleux. But he added that Swissport has regained its workforce. “We are now above pre-Covid levels. Our attrition levels are stable now – better than pre-Covid levels – except in a few pockets of places.”
Stable market
He said that in part reflects that the labour market has stabilised. “But we have also become a much better employer than before,” he said, highlighting six red rules embedded in Swissport’s station manual.
“It’s an internal project and these are six rules designed to make us a better employer. One example is, we owe our staff a proper decent break room that is smoke free, with clean toilets and enough microwave capacity. Little things like that.”
Another example is publishing shifts early enough to allow workers to more easily plan their family life. This means it is looking at shift plans a month in advance rather than days. Alongside people, Halleux identified technology as the other clear focus of the company.
“Covid put a massive light on the dependency on manpower,” he said. “The cost of manpower only goes in one direction. And what is true for ground handlers is also true for airlines. Their manpower cost also goes up. So, we need to develop solutions to optimise the manpower cost and usage and that is clearly technology.
“We have implemented technology where we were behind, so we caught up. And now we are leapfrogging and taking the lead in a number of systems, like rostering, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI),” he said. “This gets me very excited, but I can’t share too much yet.”
While noting that AI is a “trendy term”, Halleux said that it is already a reality at Swissport. He cited work around AI-trained cameras in the lounge space or on the ramp.
Consolidation is expected to continue across the sector and in publishing its full-year results, Swissport said it would pursue “selective” acquisition opportunities.
“We are not flag planters,” said Halleux. “We are not in a race to grow for size. We are extremely picky when it comes to M&A. We go after what makes sense for us. And what makes sense for somebody else, maybe doesn’t make sense for us. It’s not a one-size fits all.”
Approaching M&A
Halleux said that Swissport does not view M&A as a strategy in itself. “It’s an accelerator of growth or it’s an accelerator of something else, either it creates synergies – so therefore better profitability – or it is market entry.
“We have a roadmap,” he added. “Our strategic plan is called Vision 2030. It is a plan based on quality of service and customer-centricity, and everything revolves around that. In that plan we have identified where we want to play.
“In all three segments – ground handling, cargo and lounges – there is money to be made for everybody. There is progress and value to be created by us for the benefit of everybody. Otherwise, we would not have a strategy plan for the next five years.”
