Crew Change Logistics

Crew change, as one governed journey.

A crew change moves a rotating crew between shore and vessel: a chartered or commercial flight to the port, a crew boat or helicopter to the vessel, ground transport at either end, and a bed when weather holds the sailing. Three or four content sources, one journey. The sailing is fixed and the boat has a fixed number of seats — so no fare decides who boards; policy does. UnityTrip books the whole crew change as one journey, under one PNR and one policy engine, and rations each sailing by priority, quota, and booking window.

Crew change is the marine half of workforce aviation logistics and the sibling of FIFO travel: the same discipline — entitlement, standby, and quotas inherited from airline staff-travel systems — applied to a vessel operator's own transport. Shipping calls it crew change; offshore energy calls it personnel transfer or marine logistics. The problem is the same; so is the platform.

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Sail Periods & Peak Sailings

The peak sailing is the scarce resource

End-of-rotation and holiday sailings are where demand concentrates. Quotas cap bookings per sailing and per peak sailing, sail periods carry their own labels, and the operation defines what counts as peak — all as fields in the published schema, not as a workaround.

One Journey, Three Modes

Flight, crew boat, transfer — one record

Air, maritime, and vehicle are first-class transport modes in one policy document. A chartered flight, a crew boat, and a transfer are booked as a single multi-leg itinerary — one PNR, one cost centre, one audit trail. Content source is a property of the leg, not a separate system.

Priority & Displacement

Who boards when the boat is full

A priority matrix ranks passenger types and trip reasons — crew due on rotation outrank visitors; medical travel is deliberately unimpeded. Booking windows stage demand; displacement rules decide who waits, with a plain-English reason. Build the matrix free →

Weather & Disruption

A cancelled sailing rebooks the cohort

State is event-sourced, so a cancelled sailing's manifest is replayable and the crew are re-allocated to the next sailing under the same rules. Go-show automation fills freed seats minutes before departure; crew held ashore get a bed under the same policy through the Elina PMS integration.

Two Channels, One Sailing

Business and private travel share the boat

Crew on rotation is approved business movement; leave and dependants' travel on the same boat is private, governed by quota and sanctions, auto-approved with no approver in the loop. One test — is the trip approved? — and one priority matrix governs the seat for both. The two channels →

Manifests, Finance & Duty of Care

Who is on which vessel, and what it cost

A live manifest per sailing; no boarding without a booking number, no provider paid without an approved claim number; claims post to finance. Duty of care is one record of who is aboard, ashore, or in transit — across every mode, right now.

Measured in Production

Seat utilisation lifted from a ~40% industry average to around 90%. No-shows down by roughly half. Rotational travel under one policy layer.

This is what disciplined, policy-governed allocation achieves across leased aircraft, chartered vessels, and commercial carriers — measured production outcomes averaged across deployments and years. The levers are in the benchmarks; the model in full on the category page.

FAQ

Common questions

What is crew change logistics?

Crew change logistics is the discipline of moving a rotating crew between shore and vessel — a chartered or commercial flight to the port, a crew boat or helicopter to the vessel, ground transport at either end, and accommodation when weather holds a sailing — as one governed journey. It is the marine half of workforce aviation logistics: the sailing is fixed, the boat has a fixed number of seats, and no fare decides who boards, so policy has to — a priority matrix, quotas per sailing and per peak sailing, and booking windows, executed deterministically with the reason recorded.

How are seats on a crew boat rationed when demand exceeds capacity?

By entitlement rather than price. A priority matrix ranks passenger types and trip reasons — crew due on rotation outrank visitors, and medical travel is deliberately unimpeded — while quotas cap bookings per sailing and per peak sailing, and booking windows stage demand so a late request cannot displace an earlier entitled one. When a sailing is full, displacement rules decide who waits, and the decision is explainable: the same inputs give the same answer every time, with the rule that decided it attached. The published policy schema carries these mechanics as fields — quota timeframes include per-sector and per-peak-sailing caps, sail periods are labelled, and peak periods are defined by the operation.

Can a crew change be booked as one journey across a flight, a crew boat, and ground transport?

Yes. Air, maritime, and vehicle are first-class transport modes in one policy document, so a chartered flight, a crew boat, and a transfer are booked as a single multi-leg itinerary under one PNR and one policy engine — one record, one cost centre, one audit trail — with a bed booked under the same policy if the crew is held ashore. Three content sources, one journey; the content source is a property of each leg, not a separate system.

What happens when weather cancels a sailing?

The cohort is rebooked as a cohort. Because state is event-sourced, the cancelled sailing's manifest is replayable and the affected crew are re-allocated to the next sailing under the same priority and quota rules; go-show automation fills any seat freed by a cancellation minutes before departure; and accommodation for crew held ashore is booked within the same policy layer, so the wait is governed rather than improvised. Disruption is the normal operating condition of marine work, and the model is designed for it rather than around it.

How do the two channels apply to a marine operation?

The same single test applies: is the trip approved? Business movement — crew on rotation, contractors mobilising, technicians attending a vessel — is approved under delegation of financial authority. Private travel on company transport — leave travel, dependants, subsidised journeys — is not approved and is therefore governed by quota and sanctions; it is auto-approved in the precise sense that no approver intervenes, the quota says yes. The channel names are arbitrary; the test is not. A crew boat carries both channels on the same sailing, which is exactly why one priority matrix has to govern the seat.

Is the marine model part of the published policy schema?

Yes. The leased-travel-policy JSON Schema declares air, maritime, and vehicle as transport modes; quota timeframes include per-sector and per-peak-sailing caps alongside per-day, per-week, and per-year; sail periods carry their own labels; and an operation defines its own peak periods. The free Policy Builder writes a marine policy against that schema, and the platform executes it.