Southwest is deploying new hiring tactics, including on-the-spot interviews and instant job offers for ramp workers at Denver International Airport, in an effort to entice entry-level workers in a highly competitive US labor market. Southwest’s latest recruiting strategy comes as it battles nationwide with companies across a variety of industries to find workers for the 5,000 jobs it wants to fill this year. The Dallas-based airline aims to add another 8,000 positions in 2022. Those plans are part of a three-year goal to boost its employment ranks by 25,000, if business grows as expected, Bob Jordan, the carrier’s next chief executive officer, said Friday. A group of 10 employees known as the Tiger Team is dedicated to alleviating the hiring problem in Denver, where the company is managing the shortage of ramp workers by paying bonuses to employees in other cities to temporarily relocate. The team is staging job fairs and offering a pay differential to offset the area’s higher cost of living. The on-the-spot interviews and instant job offers are a first for the carrier, the largest in Denver, with 32% of its passengers. Southwest needs to hire more than 200 ramp workers at the Denver airport now and hundreds more going forward. “We’re utilizing every arrow in the quiver at this point,” Jordan said. “It’s an all-out war for talent, and when something is an all-out priority and all-out war, you attack it in a different way.” In 33 years at Southwest, “we’ve never had a time where the airline was constrained by people,” said Jordan, an executive vice president who will become CEO on Feb. 1. “It’s always been, can you get enough aircraft, facilities, gates. It’s never been, can we get enough people.”<br/>
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Chinese police have detained the two remaining co-founders of HNA in the latest twist in the collapse of China’s hitherto most acquisitive group. The bankrupt Chinese conglomerate, which is under state control, said chair Chen Feng and chief executive Adam Tan were taken into custody on Friday over suspected crimes, without providing details of the alleged offences. The arrests return to the spotlight one of China’s most tumultuous corporate sagas. The move by Chinese officials comes three years after co-founder Wang Jian fell to his death in Bonnieux, southern France, in what French police said was an accident. The enigmatic trio amassed a debt pile of nearly $90b in an acquisition spree that expanded the group’s assets by about $40bn in just two years in the mid-2010s. What started as an airline became a travel industry-focused conglomerate that owned stakes in the Hilton hotel chain, Dutch transport group TIP Trailer Services and Irish aircraft leaser Avolon. It boasted the biggest single stake in Deutsche Bank, marquee properties such as New York’s 245 Park Avenue and the US electronics group Ingram Micro.* But the acquisitions were highly leveraged — borrowing against its base of Chinese assets — raising concerns about a domino effect back home, if the group suddenly could not repay, or refinance, its debts. Story has full background.<br/>
AirAsia is confident of a strong recovery in air travel to all the key domestic destinations and that international flights will resume in the near future, with stringent health and safety protocols in place. The Malaysian airline says it is all geared up to fully restore its domestic and international services following the national government’s announcement of the resumption of interstate travel and the reopening of tourism activities once the vaccination rate for adults reaches 90%. AirAsia reports “overwhelming” demand for domestic leisure destinations that have reopened recently, including Langkawi in Malaysia, Boracay, Cebu and Bohol in the Philippines, and Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and Hat Yai in Thailand. Load factors for these leisure destinations have been in the range of 80%-90% and more frequencies and routes to be added soon in line with consistently strong forward bookings, it says. As vaccination rates across the globe continue to rise, AirAsia expects that interstate leisure air travel will gradually continue to reopen first, potentially in the coming weeks, and that international travel could resume within the next few months, especially in the ASEAN region where inoculation rates are rising fast. Airasia Group’s airlines president Bo Lingam states: “The demand is already there. People can’t wait to reunite with friends and family or take off to their favourite leisure destinations, and we are well prepared to paint the skies red across ASEAN as soon as the time is right."<br/>