Recruiting, Retaining and Motivating Staff for the Allure Line of Cruise Vessels - Essay Example

The case is essentially one of recruiting, retaining, and motivating staff for the Allure line of cruise vessels and deals with the issue of staffing and associated problems faced by the management of the cruise line.

If we take the first issue i.e. that of staffing the cruise ships with enough people to ensure that the ships are not understaffed, we run into several issues that range from recruiting people from as many as forty different nations and the difficulties associated with ensuring that all of them come on board after completing the visa and immigration formalities. The next issue highlighted in the case has to do with ensuring that the staff from different countries is motivated to perform under extremely pressurizing conditions and retaining them, particularly when the industry-wide attrition rate is around 35 percent.

The case highlights the discipline policies and the need for maintaining harmony with so much diversity. The case also makes note of the different rules and regulations that need to be followed as the Cruise liners are registered in one nation, operate in another, and final berth at other countries across the globe. Hence, these are some of the issues that have been highlighted in the case and they reflect the human resource management aspect of managing a cruise liner amid so much turbulence in the global tourism and travel industry.

This is the conclusion that I have reached about the issues highlighted in the case. If we consider the case in the context of the political, environmental, and legal issues as well as an analysis of the external environment under which the cruise liners operate, it becomes clear that there is a lot to be considered in terms of the factors and issues affecting them. For instance, the economic environment around the world is not currently conducive to the travel and tourism industry as the worldwide global economic slowdown has meant that fewer people travel as opposed to earlier years when there was a boom in the number of people traveling on tourism.

The political environment has been tending towards uncertainties arising out of the threat posed by piracy in the high seas.