The ferry industry is having a new leader autumn.
DFDS has a new CEO in Michael Hansen and, from 16 November, a new Chief Digital & Information Officer in Sandeep Shahi, who joins from FedEx. At Fjord Line, Heidi Nag Flikka took over as CEO in July, and Stine B. Neteland has just started as its new digital leader. P&O Ferries has a new COO with a transformation brief, Christina Morup, and a new freight commercial chief, Peter Leschly. Stena Line has Sarah West, previously CEO of Harwich Haven Authority, running its ports. And at NFI, the group behind Molslinjen, Torghatten and ForSea, Oddgeir Garnes sits in the Chief Digital Officer seat. And that’s not the full list of course.
That is a lot of new people walking into the same kind of building at the same time. Booking systems older than some of the people using them. Terminal software nobody quite wants to touch. A board that spent the summer reading about AI.
The clock starts on day one. Korn Ferry puts average CIO tenure at 4.6 years in the largest US companies, and CEO tenure at 6.9. In ferry terms the CIO figure is roughly one terminal system implementation, if it goes well. What happens in the first months decides what those years get spent on.
So here is my welcome present. Five wishes, from someone who has spent years on both sides of the table: advising transformational leaders, and then helping them build the plan once the contract was signed. Take what is useful and ignore the rest.
1. Take the 06:00 departure before you make the roadmap
The real architecture of a ferry company lives at the check-in lane, the freight gate and the call centre on the Monday after a cancelled sailing. You won't find it in the system landscape slide.
In this sector, booking and terminal systems are often 20 to 30 years old. The workarounds built around them are where the real knowledge sits. Think of the spreadsheet a freight desk trusts more than the system, or the one colleague who knows how to fix an export. Last month I wrote about a port, where border officers were still creating traveller records by hand months after the EU's Entry/Exit System officially went live. Or yesterday I read a passionate post from crew onboard. Recruitment materials say wifi onboard all ships, but in reality the volume is limited, connection is patchy, and it impacts the crew experience, passenger and commercial operations, and vessel productivity. None of that shows up in a steering group deck.
My wish: spend the first weeks on the quay, at the gate and on board before you approve anything bigger than a laptop refresh.
2. Fix the plumbing before you throw the party
Every new digital leader gets asked about AI in the first week. The honest answer is usually "after the data".
Gartner predicted that at least 30% of generative AI projects would be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, and poor data quality was first on its list of reasons. In my own conversations with ferry operators over the past few weeks, the same theme kept coming back in different words: data quality, ERP stability and process maturity are setting the pace for AI, much more than the AI tools themselves. Nobody sounded defeated. They sounded like people making hard calls in the right order.
My wish: find the one data set everyone in the company argues about (vessel schedules, freight bookings, customer records), make fixing it your first visible win, and say no to the flashy pilot until then.
3. Pick three AI use cases and say no to everything else
The value is real when it's focused. Brittany Ferries reports fuel savings of up to 6% across nine vessels from weather routing combined with a digital twin. Stena Line originally called its voyage optimisation tool "AI Captain" and renamed it soon after, "to avoid misconceptions that AI would replace human decision-making". That small naming story says a lot: half the work was never the algorithm.
One Mediterranean operator I spoke with runs AI like a portfolio. The CEO approves three or four transformative use cases a year, each scored on business case, feasibility and cybersecurity. Everything else waits. People around you will hand you twenty ideas. Three finished ones beat twenty pilots.
My wish: agree a short list with your CEO, three use cases at most, each with a business case, a feasibility check and a cyber review. Finish those before you open the next one.
4. Make the business own the process, even when it's uncomfortable
BCG's study of digital transformations found that 70% fall short of their objectives. The six factors that turn the odds around include commitment from the CEO all the way down to middle management, and a technology platform led by the business. Companies that got only three or four of the six right still failed.
The ferry version of this is familiar. When ferry CIOs describe what actually blocks them, the answers are rarely technical: no sponsor among the process owners, resistance from crew, a smart port project stopped because the business benefits were unclear. A digital leader who owns all the change also owns all the blame.
My wish: before you sign the next big contract, put a named business owner next to every system that matters (booking, terminal, freight, revenue management), and let them co-own the success criteria.
5. Let your prices leave the building
The sale is moving to where the traveller already is. In the last week of September, Viking Line and FlixBus launched single-booking sea and coach journeys on Helsinki to Tallinn and Stockholm to Turku, and Princess Cruises launched a native app inside ChatGPT. One ferry operator I know already has a conversational agent that completes the full ticket purchase.
That puts a blunt question on a new leader's desk. Could a partner you don't control get a live price and a confirmed seat out of your booking system today, safely? If the honest answer is "with a project", that project belongs on your first-year roadmap.
My wish: before the end of your first quarter, ask one partner to try pulling a live price and a confirmed booking out of your system. Whatever stops them goes to the top of the roadmap.
A humble footnote and one request
None of these wishes are new. Most leaders reading this could have written the list themselves, and at least one of them will strongly disagree with number five. Good. I would still bet on all five.
Now the request. If you know one of the new ferry leaders and you agree with at least three of the five, forward this to them. If you disagree, send it anyway and tell me which one is wrong. I would love to lose the argument over coffee rather than never have it.
And if I've missed a new appointment, let me know. The list is clearly getting longer, which tells me the sector is in for some interesting changes.