The vantage point
He has had this conversation hundreds of times.
James Roberts has 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.
Why a headhunter, specifically
Senior exits in these industries very often run through a paid leave period, and the man sitting at home on full pay is precisely the man a headhunter is speaking to. Not after he has decided. During.
So the sample is unusual: hundreds of long, private, off-the-record conversations with men in exactly this position, at the point where nothing was settled and there was no reason to perform.
What he is not
Not an employment lawyer, not a financial adviser, not a therapist, not a careers coach, and holds no qualification in any of them. He cannot read your agreement and would not offer to.
What he has is pattern recognition about how men behave in an unstructured, paid, finite stretch of time — gathered by accident, in one industry, over one working lifetime.
The thing that surprised him
Across continents, cultures and salary bands, the men he interviewed 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.
That 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 men asking him about it are no longer asking about a merger or a market. They are asking whether the work itself will still be the work, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
What can be offered is what the last several rounds looked like from inside, and what the panic reliably costs. 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.