British shippers wary of ELAA proposals

British shippers wary of ELAA proposals    The United Kingdom’s Freight Transport Association, which represents British shippers and logistics companies, said it is “skeptical” about recent proposals put forward by the carrier group, the European Liner Affairs Association, for an alternative to liner conferences.
   “It is still not abundantly clear just what the business benefit to shipping lines, let alone to shippers, can be derived from the type, detail and format of the specific information and data that has been described by ELAA,” said Chris Welsh, the FTA’s general manager, campaigns. “Neither is it clear why it is so necessary to interpret this data between all the operators on any given trade lane. We remain, therefore, naturally skeptical about the proposals and the intentions of ELAA’s members.
   “To this end we are hoping to meet ELAA’s members in the near future to give them the opportunity to explain the justification for the proposals. In particular we cannot understand why it would not be better for the individual carriers to get the information about volumes and trends and forecasts directly from their individual key customers on a regular basis,” said Welsh
   The ELAA’s latest proposal is available at: https://www.elaa.net/documents/RevisedELAAProposal.pdf