Skipped sailings the flavor of the season

Skipped sailings the flavor of the season    If the liner carrier industry were like the fashion industry, then the strategy of 'skipped sailings' would be anointed the color of the season.
   More appropriate would be to say that lines in the past few months have augmented their wholehearted embrace of slow steaming (last season's de rigeur strategic tool) with skipped sailings.
   Like slow steaming, the concept of omitting a sailing is nothing new to the industry. But the fact that so many carriers and alliances have chosen to use it in the last quarter to hedge against weak demand is new.
   A quick search of American Shipper's news database reveals a handful of instances of skipped or omitted sailings since fall — either those announced outright by carriers or alliances, or those discovered by the schedule researchers at American Shipper affiliate ComPair Data.
   Most notable are omitted sailings on a New World Alliance transpacific service and dropped Asia/Europe sailings from the CKYH and Grand alliances, as well as Maersk Line and CMA CGM.
   There are essentially three ways a line can reduce effective capacity without suspending a service:
   ' Slow steaming (meaning introducing more ships into a string and slowing it down).
   ' Reducing the average vessel size deployed (i.e. moving from 8,000-TEU ships to 6,000-TEU vessels).
   ' Selectively skipping sailings.
   All three correlate with minimizing capacity available to shippers. But for carriers, a skipped sailing has inherent operational advantages over the other two measures. There is much less disruption to a line's schedule and no redirection of vessels required from other services or from layup.
   In fact, a better comparison for skipped sailings is the so-called peak loader services — ad hoc extra sailings carriers run when demand is higher than anticipated. Carriers ran these peak loaders quite a bit in the first half of 2010 as they encountered what they called an unanticipated demand spike on virtually all the major global trades.
   For shippers, carriers' increasing reliance on selective skipping or adding of sailings could come as a comfort, particularly if lines and alliances are upfront with their customers about which sailings they plan to omit. That's because the alternatives to omitted sailings, such as service suspensions, are far from desirable.
   But where shippers will bristle is when the skipped sailings come in concert with slow steaming and other measures that slow down supply chains and force them to carry extra inventory.
   But let's face it: isn't it preferable, from a shipper's standpoint, to be talking about services running every other week on a fixed schedule than to see massive amounts of capacity pulled through service suspensions?
   The fact that we are nearly at the end of January — just a few days away from the Chinese New Year — and nary a single major transpacific or Asia/Europe loop has been pulled suggests that service suspensions aren't in the interest of carriers either. And the skipped sailings have, for the most part, been confined to a few services out of a range of options on those trades.
   Perhaps one positive for shippers from slow steaming is that it has allowed carriers to use their fleets in such a way that a planned omitted sailing here and there will do. ' Eric Johnson