ALPHALINER Liner Services - AXSMarine

ALPHALINER – Liner Services Guide –
The worldwide reference in liner shipping
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Why is there sometimes one additional ship listed in a service data sheet ?
For some services plied by a well defined number of ships -such as weekly fixed day
services-, it happens that the count of ships attached to the service data sheet shows one
ship more than indicated in the service description. This can be explained by one of the
following reasons :
- A ship entering General Repairs (dry dock) is temporarily replaced, but continues to
appear in the schedules as the duration of GR is less than the duration of a full rotation
(Ships use to stay three weeks on average in GR).
- An additional ship is temporarily inserted to scoop up a surplus of containers.
- An additional ship is temporarily inserted to fill a sailing gap caused by delays.
- On pendulum services, a ship turns 'en route' for operational reasons and so does not
achieve the full rotation. The complement of rotation is done by another ship, which adds
to the fleet.
- Cascade effects create overlappings in schedules (the entering ship follows the
departing ship at one end of the rotation).
- Conversely, ships can be missing as a sailing is skipped for planned or unplanned
reasons.
It also happens that a 'TBN' ship (To Be Named) appears to make up the number. Usually,
the name of the ship appears in schedules, but does not correspond to a physical ship. We
add in this case the mention (tbn). This case remains rare. Some lines also advertise ghost
ships with imaginary names to not show gaps in weekly schedules.
In extreme cases, the TBN ship is not chartered in time, or is delayed. This is quite rare but
it happens from time to time, especially when there is a chronic lack of ships available for
charter. In this case, smaller ships can be chartered at the last minute or shipments can be
arranged on other services (including those of competitors).
Sometimes, ships are squarely missing, often because of a ship shortage, of because as a
result of contingency measures resulting in a ship sent at the last minute on another service.
Why are destinations such as Dallas, Toronto, Moscow or Delhi not covered ?
Alphaliner objective is to serve first the liner shipping industry, not the transportation industry
as a whole. In this respect, our Search tool covers only sea ports and it excludes inland
destinations, which are outside of our scope.
Although Maersk Line, CMA CGM, MSC etc. cover inland destinations and as such are
multimodal transportation companies, not just shipping companies, our coverage is limited
to their shipping arms. Road haulage, stack trains, river barging or air transportation are not
covered by our system.
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