The Covid-19 pandemic forced V.Group into a new line of work.
With hotels unwilling to take on the liability of housing seafarers, the ship manager started running its own accommodation last summer.
"We started being hotel managers ourselves," said Allan Falkenberg, V.Group's chief executive of crew management and offshore.
Running two facilities with nearly 400 rooms to make sure seafarers can get adequate quarantine before crew changes is not something the company is likely to continue as the pandemic winds down.
But V.Group and other ship managers have provided new benefits for their crews that will stick around.
"Generally, there's been an understanding that we need to connect with our crew better during such [a] crisis," Falkenberg told TradeWinds.
For V.Group, that included increased bandwidth and more telephone time for seafarers to call their families. The company also put in place mental health services and established a hotline for captains to speak with doctors about Covid-19 symptoms impacting a vessel's crew.
Falkenberg also said V.Group worked to provide alternative food offerings for those on board to lighten their mood.
"I think definitely internet on board has proven to be a huge benefit not only for operations, but mentally for crew welfare," Falkenberg said. "I see that going forward as being more standard."
He also mentioned more care in the logistics of getting seafarers from their homes to the location of crew changes could be a point of emphasis moving forward, rather than just providing a plane ticket.
Columbia Shipmanagement chief executive Mark O'Neil said internet access was "almost a human right" in 2021 and said the company made access unlimited during the pandemic.
He said Columbia hired a top catering company to improve the menus and provide fresh produce on the ships and launched an e-learning platform in a partnership with software giant Adobe to provide a tailored online training programme to its seafarers.
He said much of that had started before the pandemic, as Columbia worked to organise its business around what O'Neil called an "I care" ethos.
"Columbia was in good shape to deal with this, but I dare say that was more by accident than by design, simply because we embarked on a real bottom-up, top-down philosophy of 'I care' two years before Covid hit us," he said.
