The vantage point
When an industry restructures, the men leaving it call the headhunter.
James Roberts spent thirty years headhunting inside airline, aviation, travel, events, cruise, corporate travel, space travel and hospitality. He became an entrepreneur in 2005 and lives in the Canary Islands.
An unusual sample
Those industries were taken apart and rebuilt repeatedly — wars, recessions, a financial crisis, low-cost carriers, online booking, consolidation, a pandemic. Every round produced men whose roles had just gone, and a large number of them picked up the phone to a headhunter within weeks.
So the conversations were early, long, private and off the record, at the point where nothing had been decided and there was nothing to be gained by putting on a face. That is where the observations on this site came from. They were not gathered deliberately.
What he is not
Not a solicitor, not an employment lawyer, not a financial adviser, not a doctor, not a therapist, not a careers coach, and holds no qualification in any of them. He cannot tell you what you are entitled to and would not offer an opinion on your settlement.
What he has is pattern recognition about how men behave in the months after a role goes. One industry, one working lifetime, no claim beyond that.
The thing that surprised him
Across continents, cultures and salary bands, the men he spoke to at this moment wanted broadly the same things and feared broadly the same things. He expected the differences to be cultural. Overwhelmingly the main difference was language.
It is why this guide is written from travel rather than for travel. Very little of it is industry-specific.
Why write it down now
Because the reason for the phone call has changed. It used to be a merger, a market, a bad season. Increasingly it is that the work itself is being done differently, and nobody honestly knows where that settles.
What can be offered is what the previous rounds looked like from the inside, and what reliably went wrong in the third month. That is on one page, and the AI guide will talk it through.
No client, employer or candidate is ever named on this site, and the guide will not confirm whether James has worked with any company or person.