“It is disappointing that, even after the big re-organisation of container services following the start of new alliances, carriers still do not meet the expectations of their customers - on the contrary,” said Nik Delmeire, Secretary General of the European Shippers’ Council.

“At the time of the survey, the carriers’ Emergency Bunker Surcharge, which we regard as customer unfriendly, was not yet in place, and it is reasonable to think that the results of the survey would be worse if it was done now,” he added.

The ESC invites carriers to meet their customers to discuss real operational issues, as already happens successfully in the European rail freight sector, instead of resorting to new cost surcharges.

“Shippers and forwarders want a balance between service quality and price, but the survey shows that carriers are cutting back on service and offering less choice to shippers,” said Philip Damas, head of the logistics practice at Drewry.

To receive a higher level of customer service, some Drewry customers actively avoid direct contracts with ocean carriers and instead deal with forwarders and intermediaries. “These issues make Drewry focus more on the transit times and service levels of providers when we provide benchmarking analytics to beneficial cargo owners,” Damas commented.

The ESC and Drewry gathered satisfaction scores for individual ocean carriers, but they considered that the number of responses was not high enough to justify publicising individual results. The two organisations are calling on industry associations or partners to help scale this initiative to become a large, independent monitoring exercise of service quality by carrier.