Originally Posted by
WyomingBound
I will add another one.......for the very longest time GCM was outsourced for gate agents/check in staff (except the Station Manager and maybe some other staff).....GCM is now mainline employees doing gate/check-in duties (ramp duties still outsourced). For one flight a day post-COVID it shocks me, but the mainline folks in GCM do an amazing job! The station manager (Kevin) is a great person.
Most carriers have a station manager in international locations... if anything they serve as the legal representative (and miss paying a bill and they get arrested!). I didn't mention earlier when speaking about domestic, but frequently international (as in non-US, speaking from a US airline perspective), it's fairly commonplace that one (or two) ground handlers have a sole concession for the whole airport. That isn't so common in the US (though Miami famously limits to something like 3 or 4 ramp handler licenses for the whole airport and has since the 1970s). For the above-wing, there is usually a little more leeway to select a vendor, or place your own employees in place. That really depends a lot on labor laws. Some countries make it next to impossible to terminate local employees of a US company, even if you stop flying there! (Google TWA/American and TLV service if you want to go down a rabbit hole on that)
Sometimes you think you have a choice.... when the carrier where I worked contracts started service to Managua, the entity owned by the government does most of the ground handling (and a "general" with 6 stars on his epaulettes runs it). We selected a smaller independent handler. The whole roster was going to be dedicated to our flights (we paid the monthly salary, to help with retention and stability - that's common place in a lot of Central America/Caribbean locations). Well, I guess we chose wrong. The Nicaraguan government said "actually, no" and nationalized the ground handler we contracted. So, ended up with the government doing the ramp. Pick a door A B or C... they all have the same thing behind them.
Even with ground handlers in many Latin America/Caribbean countries, especially those that may not be as well off economically as others, there tends to be a lot of longevity (like agents who have worked one airline contract for 10-15 years). In some places working for a US carrier (or the airport period) is still considered a very highly sought-after job. Plus even if they are working for a handler, still the US carrier will sponsor visas to come to the US for training, which is fairly valuable in some places. Speaking of MGA, I know in one case, an airline had less than 10% turnover in the contract ground staff in the first decade of service.
Originally Posted by beachmouse
VPS has been a dumpster fire for every airline operation there since 2021 except for maybe Sun Country (not enough flights to get the full spectrum of issues) When she made that announcement, I was like ‘this is the person who resigns next week to take a less stressful and better paying job running the sporting goods department at Walmart’ because even professional people can burn out on a chronic issue where there’s no fix in sight.
I know that feeling. I went from HDQ to do temporary duty running a station that was a perpetual dumpster fire in the middle of vendor change (and our station manager got fired). Joke was on me. I went for 6 weeks and got stuck for 6 years, though growing from a dozen flights a day to about 40 when I left. I think I aged 20 years in those 6 years and was first to throw my hand up for a voluntary furlough during COVID (I had to point out - if you wanted to limit it to certain people, you shouldn't have written the program for everyone...)