Maersk adds Asia-Europe service guarantee to 2 new ports

   The liner carrier Maersk Line said Monday it has extended its delivery time guaranteed product from Asia to Northern Europe to two additional ports in Asia – Jakarta and Laem Chabang.
   The two ports will be added to the four existing origin ports (Shanghai, Ningbo, Yantian, and Tanjung Pelepas) in the Daily Maersk product. The service provides shippers with guaranteed transportation times to three Northern European ports – Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, and Felixstowe.
   Maersk will apply the same money-back guarantees to shipments from Jakarta and Laem Chabang as it does from the other four ports if it fails to deliver a container to the final container yard within the stipulated time. In the case of the newly added ports, Maersk is promising 31 days from cut-off.
   Unlike the other ports in the Daily Maersk service, Jakarta and Laem Chabang will have two weekly cut-offs, whereas the previous origins have daily cut-offs. However, shippers can gate-in their cargo any day of the week.
   Maersk said it will start taking bookings immediately.
   The new origin ports have been added nearly a year after the Danish container line started its Daily Maersk product by leveraging its Asia-Europe network of services.
   “When we launched Daily Maersk, we were trying to implement a new service standard that our customers could expect to get from us,” said Vincent Clerc, Maersk Line’s chief trade and marketing officer. “We wondered at times during the development if we’d bitten off more than we could chew. Fortunately our hard work seems to have paid off, a year on we are achieving 98 percent reliability and feedback from customers is positive. So, we’ve taken everything we’ve learnt from Daily Maersk and we’ve decided to extend the Daily Maersk promise to our customers on these additional routes.” – Eric Johnson