You Can Budget for Equipment. You Can’t Budget for Fallout.

In assisted travel operations, the highest costs rarely sit on the purchase order.

They show up afterwards: someone gets a strain injury and drops out of the roster, a passenger incident turns into a complaint or claim, damage triggers reports and follow-up, and suddenly you are spending time, attention, and money on everything except the actual turnaround.

We do not run airport operations. But as a producer supplying to different countries and operating models, you start seeing the same thing repeat: incidents are rarely one big failure. They are usually a chain of small moments under time pressure, and manual lifting is often the common denominator.

That is also why some public numbers are genuinely sobering. The UK HSE has published airport-related notes indicating that manual handling accounts for a large share of reported injuries at airports, including an estimate that it represented 55% of “over three-day” injuries in one RIDDOR snapshot, and that manual handling injury rates in handling were estimated at around five times the all-industry average.

Zoom out, and the same theme shows up in national workplace statistics too, with “handling, lifting or carrying” consistently flagged as a major contributor to employer-reported non-fatal injuries.

My angle is simple: when assisted travel is judged as ‘too slow’ or ‘too cumbersome’, it is tempting to optimise for speed by keeping manual lift moments in place. But those manual steps are exactly where a lot of injury risk,
passenger risk, and claims exposure lives.

From what we see globally, the most scalable improvements are the ones that remove lift and carry moments from the workflow, without asking staff to compensate with their bodies during peak pressure.

𝐖𝐞𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐇𝐮𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐬
Sales Manager, Special Mobility

Focused on practical, scalable PRM solutions for airports

𝘍𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘗𝘙𝘔 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴, 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘱𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵