In conversation with Airline Routes & Ground Services, Guillaume Halleux, chief commercial officer at Swissport, reveals how the ground handling company is “transforming and reshaping our industry for the twenty-first century”
Guillame, in January Warwick Brady outlined a “very ambitious vision” to increase the number of countries, stations and warehouses in Swissport’s global network in 2025. How do you assess the company’s progress on this vision so far?
Warwick told you that we had ambitions to grow our network, country stations and warehouses, and we are on track to do that. The first example I’ll give you is our ground handling operations in Frankfurt which started on 1 February.
[Frankfurt] is among the busiest airports in Europe and [is] Lufthansa’s home base. Pretty much every airline flies to Frankfurt. We’re very proud of this accomplishment. We started with a very strong performance.
Despite some initial local challenges, in the first six months we have served over 6,500 flights, more than 1,480,000 passengers and delivered around 1.2 million bags. Frankfurt is on its way to becoming one of our top stations in the coming months following the ramp up.
Another example that illustrates our path to growth is our recent announcement that we have been awarded a contract for one of the best cargo warehouses in New York, JFK airport, by our long-standing customer Korean Air Cargo. Following a bidding process, it chose Swissport due to our quality standards and customer centricity.
Those are the two biggest examples I can give you. There are many smaller ones in our network, but in that respect, the first half of the year has been doing quite well.
From a business-as-usual perspective, Q1 and Q2 have been quite strong equally. We are on track to deliver our 2026 forecast in terms of volume of business and net business growth.
How has Swissport navigated the challenges of the Trump tariffs, Middle East political instability and other disruptions in the first half of 2025?
The tariffs introduced by the new US administration have had an impact on our operation and on aviation in general. We’ve seen a decline in certain passenger routes in terms of traffic but rather limited, so it did not have a significant effect on us.
On the cargo side, although there’s been significant volatility in terms of volumes, they have gone up by ca. 5% compared to last year in our network as we have managed to compensate for the effect of the tariffs thanks to our diversified network. There has been a redirection of the Chinese traffic into Europe so some real upside in some of our European stations such as Liège, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt and the UK.
In a nutshell, we see less e-commerce flows into the USA, but a lot more flows into Europe, Brazil, and into Latin America in general. So, if I compute both components equally, the net effect is balanced.
That market driver led to another one, which is uncertainty, and no business likes an uncertain environment. As a result, we see our airline customers facing challenges to make commitments in the long term. We have been working hard to continue to grow, and we keep growing thanks to our incredible people, our operational excellence and the strength of our brand.
In January, Brady also said Swissport was “strong on organic and M&A growth” in 2024. How does 2025 compare so far this year? Have you got further M&A in the pipeline for 2025?
Our M&A strategy continues to be strong, and we do have a significant pipeline. Unlike others, we don’t acquire companies for the sake of growing in absolute numbers. Our acquisitions and our M&A activities serve a strategic purpose of business line, diversification, or geographical diversification and strategic positioning.
That means that we are very picky in our M&A targets because we want them to serve our overall strategy focused on enhancing our platform in markets where we can optimise growth, margin and resilience across the portfolio.
How has Swissport adjusted in Europe since the launch of EASA’s new ground handling regulations?
Swissport has been actively involved in the Rulemaking Task Force with EASA for several years, helping to design this new era of ground handling regulation. The new regulation brings in the innovative approach of ‘co-operative oversight’ where global ground handlers like Swissport can leverage our common global safety standards and management system. Under the new model regulatory oversight of Swissport’s HQ will be performed by Swiss FOCA and each individual station within EASA scope will then be overseen by individual host States.
Last year, Swissport welcomed EASA and several of the European authorities in our headquarters in Zurich to perform a trial audit under the new concept and this successful collaboration has supported Swissport’s preparations as well as informing additional guidance material for both the regulators and the ground handling community. With the first declarations starting to be required in 2027, we are confident that we will be fully ready and look forward to the level playing field that this new regulation will bring.
How is Swissport leveraging technology across its air cargo/ground handling operations to drive forward safety, efficiency and sustainability?
This is a very important topic for Swissport, and it’s a topic that’s very close to my heart. We are investing millions in new technology to make us better in terms of reliability and efficiency and to make us stronger in terms of commercial positioning towards our customers.
Our vision is for Swissport to become the high-tech handler of the industry. I obviously cannot disclose some of our confidential R&D projects, but I can give you two examples of what we’ve done that are now in the public domain.
We have rolled out the technology of Samsara in the US which has been deployed in all our closed cabin vehicles. We have seen an immediate benefit in terms of safety with a reduction of 50% in incident occurrences in less than a year.
We have launched a similar technology in the UK and Ireland, and we are about to replicate these initiatives in other regions worldwide. This has enhanced our safety and reliability standards which is key to our customers.
The second example is even more groundbreaking, because this is a technology that we have developed ourselves – a product that we are launching called Matchbox. It’s a digital tool that prevents inadmissible passengers from reaching the destination.
It’s a superior scanning technology with mobile devices that is linked to an AI-powered system that understands the regulatory requirement for every single passenger travelling to a certain destination. We have created and are maintaining a database of entry regulation in every country, similar to what IATA does, except that we update ours on an hourly basis.
Every day we scan 2.2 million pages of regulation requirements from the immigration websites of all countries in the world. And the updates are done instantly in our system.
Using this technology, we have scanned 2.5 million passengers over the past 12 months in a pilot in Zurich. And we are very proud to say that not a single inadmissible went through. So, our success [rate] is 100%.
We are rolling out that technology in our stations progressively, and we are offering to partner with airlines to deploy it in their hubs. I told you technology was close to my heart and is a very important topic.
I think in our industry, it’s a matter of survival. Only the handlers that will master technology and make massive use of it to be more efficient and to be leaner, will succeed in the next century.
Swissport is at the forefront of technological change. We are transforming and reshaping our industry for the twenty-first century, moving from processing passengers to creating airport experiences. The airport of tomorrow is being designed right now and Swissport is leading it.
