Retaining seafarers has improved moderately over the past year, thanks to salary increases, Danica Crewing Specialists indicate.
However, its latest survey of in-house crew managers in shipowning and ship management companies also showed that shortages of competent seafarers is still apparent.
The Danish crew agency found that almost 90% of those surveyed had increased salaries in 2024, compared to 58% in 2023.
Seven percent did not raise crew wages at all over the past year, while 4% lowered salary levels. In 2023, 27% did not adjust or decrease wage levels.
Henrik Jensen, company CEO, explained to TradeWinds: “Our figures are based on the year 2024 in comparison to 2023. During that period the majority of shipping markets were generally good, which encouraged owners to increase wages.”
Danica’s crew managers’ survey complements its annual Seafarers’ Survey released in late 2024 and included 56 respondents, particularly across Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark and Germany.
Unsurprisingly, as a result of increasing salaries, retention rates also improved, the report outlined.
“The fluctuation of seafarers has generally reduced, with 41% of crew managers reporting the retention rate has improved during the past 12 months, compared to only 29% in the previous survey period.”
However, 23% of companies did say they felt the retention rate had worsened, although this is still a decrease compared to the 36% in the 2023 survey.
Regarding the improvement in retention rates, Jensen said: “Seafarer recruitment and retention was seriously impacted by the pandemic and has been gradually improving since then as the crewing sector evolved its crewing strategies.”
One strategy involves broadening the recruitment pool.
“We see far fewer owners employing seafarers of only one nationality now but instead diversifying their strategy by recruiting from pools of seafarers in several different countries,” Jensen told TradeWinds.
In 2023, 42% of companies planned to recruit from additional nationalities within a year. By 2024, that figure had risen to 57%.
Overall, fewer respondents reported a decline in recruitment throughout 2024. However, about one-third still felt that the intake of “new competent hands” had worsened over the past 12 months — an improvement from the 46% who said the same in 2023.
Jensen said in the report: “This indicates that it is not a shortage of seafarers which concerns crew managers but rather a shortage of competent seafarers.”
In addition, the data outlined that 80% of crew managers/directors report to the highest level in the organisation and are on the same level as technical and financial heads.
This is an increase compared to the 2023 survey, with Jensen remarking: “This could indicate a trend that shipping companies have elevated the prioritising of the crewing of their vessels.”
Danica’s 2023 survey also identified that crew managers were finding their job harder than in the past.
However, in its 2024 results, 38% reported they felt the complexity of their job had not increased.
“Of course, this doesn’t mean that finding [a] crew has become easy!” concluded Jensen.
