Whether in the oil and gas industry or on luxury cruises, working at sea can adversely affect crew and other sea workers. According to the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (MLC 2006), ships are obligated to provide for their crew welfare. However, the remote nature of life at sea can make fulfilling this obligation challenging. Satellite can tackle this challenge effectively and economically.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the benefits of maintaining crew welfare and how you can ensure the welfare of your crew with a new connectivity solution: Eutelsat ADVANCE Maritime.
The Benefits of Crew Welfare
Crew welfare ensures the safety and right of every seafarer to decent working and living conditions on board a vessel. It includes health protection, medical care, entertainment measures and other forms of social security. The addition of more and better welfare services over time has offered crew members a better experience when cut off from life ashore, making crew life better at sea through recreational facilities and cultural and educational activities.
Crew welfare may be a legal requirement, but it also has many business benefits:
Increased Safety
A lot of crew welfare initiatives help crew identify situations where their safety or the safety of their peers is at risk. In this manner, all crew contribute to making their working environment safe and secure.
Greater Efficiency
Crew who are taken care of mentally and physically have been noted to perform better in day-to-day tasks and during critical events. Crew welfare thus increases the efficiency of the crew and ship overall.
Better Morale
Welfare addresses the morale of the crew at large and thus has a positive effect on morale. The benefits of morale include better team cohesion, greater investment and care in tasks around the ship, and increased effort when working.
Added Recruitment Benefits
Welfare initiatives encourage higher crew retention and provide additional incentives to recruiting new, skilled members who often have the option to select which jobs they take.
Enhanced On-board Health
Continuing a voyage if a crew member is taken ill can lead to their condition worsening. This could result in ships having to divert or even arrange a medical evacuation, leading to major costs and delays. Welfare initiatives ensure that the health of your crew is a priority for any charter.
Eutelsat ADVANCE Maritime Satellite Internet Solution
Thankfully, solutions available today offer multiple ways to improve crew welfare. One of the best options for the maritime industry is providing crew access to connectivity. However, maritime vessels of all sizes are often poorly equipped to provide reliable voice and data solutions for crew and customers alike.
Eutelsat has sought to address this challenge through ADVANCE Maritime. Eutelsat ADVANCE Maritime is a connectivity solution that provides powerful, extensive coverage for maritime internet services around the world. Available via a network of service providers, it offers total flexibility on industrial bandwidth requirements while providing guaranteed performance and customised service and SLAs for VIP vessels.
Advantages of Satellite Internet for Crew Welfare
Many of the reasons ADVANCE Maritime is so effective for crew welfare rest on its utilisation of Eutelsat’s advanced satellite services. In terms of providing quality crew welfare, satellite offers many advantages for the maritime industry:
Global reach
No matter how remote a voyage is, you can rest assured that only satellite has the ability to provide global reach. In the case of Eutelsat ADVANCE, our satellites are positioned to provide coverage and signal across the ocean no matter where you go.
Reliable connectivity
Satellite services often have failsafe measures when a service is down for maintenance. However, ADVANCE Maritime takes this one step further, providing complete redundant coverage in the most remote parts of the world. This ensures you have a stable connection no matter where you are.
Light-weight equipment
Satellite connectivity equipment has come a long way since the days of dedicating entire rooms for communications. Today, with ADVANCE Maritime you can completely manage your entire connectivity services quickly and easily, with a solution that doesn’t take much setup or space.
Seamless connectivity
When switching over to a stronger signal, our extensive coverage redundancy ensures a seamless transition. ADVANCE Maritime offers automatic fast-switching capabilities to provide a reliable connection wherever the ship is, and no matter the weather or conditions at sea.
Go Beyond Crew Welfare
Eutelsat ADVANCE Maritime goes beyond providing crew welfare opportunities. It can be used extensively for the optimisation of maritime operations and future technologies, with per-ship connectivity plans or aggregated wholesale plans for service providers, depending on your needs. If you would like to find out more on the benefits of Eutelsat ADVANCE, visit the official website, or contact us if you would like a demonstration.