Marta Isern: “We have grown because we make a good team”

Marta Isern Fiol still remembers that Friday at midday when she received a phone call from the headquarters of Baleària in Dénia telling her: “Tomorrow — Saturday! — take the Federico García Lorca in Palma at 8 in the morning and come to Dénia to begin your training.”

 

Marta was 25 years old and today, 21 years later, she is Baleària’s ticket-office supervisor in Alcúdia. She now remembers that call as an example of the dynamism of a shipping company that leads a sector which, as Marta points out, “never stops; the company operates Monday to Sunday, 24 hours a day, 12 months a year”. 

From Alcúdia, a workplace she has never left, Marta has been able to witness Baleària’s evolution first-hand. She remembers the innovation represented by the arrival of the Ramon Llull compared with the vessels operating at Alcúdia port at the time, such as the Isla de Ibiza and the Bahía de Málaga. “The Martín i Soler also generated a great deal of excitement because it was a larger, newer ship,” she recalls. Marta Isern also remembers that when she began working for the company, Alcúdia port had very basic facilities. Everything changed in 2010, “when the new ferry terminal in Alcúdia opened; moving from the small container where we had the ticket office to the new building was a huge change,” she says.

Pride in belonging

 

Of her work at Baleària, Marta especially values the stability it has brought to her personal life: “Having a job where I live, feeling that you belong to a company, being part of Baleària and feeling that they have never let us down, either in the good times or in difficult moments such as the pandemic or the economic crises we have been through; we have always been able to count on the company.”

For the Alcúdia ticket-office supervisor, it is essential that the whole team feels part of the project. This goes hand in hand with the fact that Baleària “is not afraid to move forward; it constantly modernises and takes risks to stay up to date”. She sums it all up in one emphatic sentence: “We have grown because we make a good team.”

The evolution Marta refers to also extends to the technology used in day-to-day ticket-office operations: “I remember the printers we had when the Alcúdia route first opened, with continuous carbon-copy paper... they jammed, the paper tore, you had to separate it by hand, and if they failed we filled out the tickets by hand and then, depending on the type of journey, we tore off more or fewer copies at check-in… nothing like the thermal-paper printers we have now, which are fast and hardly ever fail.”

In any case, what Marta Isern values most about her work is the trust Baleària’s operations generate among customers who, she explains, “especially in winter are repeat passengers, people who, for example, travel back and forth to Menorca for work or family reasons”. Some have been regular customers since the route began: “They already greet me by name... after so many years the relationship becomes very close,” she says.

Alcúdia is a small Baleària branch with very pronounced peaks in workload, such as the one that coincides with the Sant Joan festivities in Ciutadella, when thousands of Mallorcans board in Alcúdia to reach the heart of the celebrations. At those times, the work focuses on making boarding procedures as quick as possible, and electronic boarding passes become especially valuable.

“Everyone does a bit of everything in Alcúdia, from helping customers at the ticket office to freight bookings, boarding operations and more administrative tasks. My day-to-day work is very varied. As the person in charge, I also support the whole team with any questions or problems that may arise,” explains Baleària’s ticket-office supervisor in Alcúdia.