Maersk puts Tangiers call with AE9

   The liner shipping company Maersk Line has added a single eastbound call at Tangiers to its weekly Asia-Europe loop AE9, dropping the previous eastbound call at Malaga, but leaving the westbound Malaga call intact.
   The service has a revised rotation of Bremerhaven, Felixstowe, Zeebrugge, Tangiers, Ningbo, Shanghai, Xiamen, Yantian, Tanjung Pelepas, Malaga, and Bremerhaven. It is operated by nine Maersk vessels with an average capacity of 6,086 TEUs.
   The new Tangiers call is Maersk’s only direct connection between Tangiers and Asia, or to and from anywhere else for that matter. The addition of Tangiers to any of Maersk’s services is noteworthy, given the carrier’s actions in early December, when it ended direct calls there by the last four of its services: its Asia-Europe strings AE6 and AE7; its Indian Subcontinent to east coast of South America Rumba service; and its round Africa West Mediterranean to South Africa and Middle East MEW1.
   Those calls at Tangiers were replaced with ones at Algeciras on the AE6, AE7, and MEW1 services and at Malaga by the Rumba.
   That move by Maersk followed withdrawal in October from Tangiers of all 12 of its West African loops, citing “dissatisfactory service levels” and a “combination of repeated disruptions and a lack of any guarantee of improvements in the foreseeable future.”
   Maersk’s intra-Europe specialist brand Seago currently makes no calls at Tangiers either. — ComPair Data, Ben Meyer