We followed an invitation of Hapag Lloyd to see the presentation of the their new Transatlantic services as of April 2017, when the THE Alliance will start to operate.
Please find here the link to their online brochure listing the specifics of their new services: CLICK
It was an impressive presentation starting with the speech of Mr Richard Yoneoka, the American Consul General in Hamburg.
Fact is that Hapag Lloyd will come up with 14 services across the Atlantic, some of them from the North Continent, some ex Med ports. Lots of direct calls…
7 of the services will be outside of THE Alliance.
The service pattern will change to so called “shuttle services”, which will call a few ports only to make sure that a fast transit time can be materialized. Obviously on the Transatlantic Hapag will not follow the tendency towards giant vessels, but will rather go for smaller ones offering direct services.
Besides that, they claim to have:
the only direct service to US & Canada Westcoast
a direct service to Mexico without US stop over
Hapag Lloyd made clear that the new schedules are not expected to increase the realistic transport capacity, i.e. the number of full containers that the ships can load in reality. The nominal capacity might change, but those are numbers on paper only.
Hapag will take / maintain a major role on the Transatlantic in future, that is for sure.
We will keep you informed.