Business, Freight News, Logistics, Sea

Christmas at sea

[ December 20, 2012   //   Chris ]

A multimodal effort ensured that a seven metre Christmas tree greeted passengers on the Hapag Lloyd Cruises ship MS Europa on Christmas morning.

The tree was grown and felled in Austria and started its journey to join up with the cruise ship on the back of a 12 metre truck to London. At Heathrow Airport, it took a team of eight cargo handlers to carefully load the tree onto one of Virgin Atlantic’s Airbus A340-300 flights to Cape Town, South Africa.
Carsten Leder, managing director of Tefra Travel Logistics, the airfreight logistics provider explains: “An old German tradition is to deliver high quality trees onto the vessels for Christmas time. The MS Europa was officially voted the ‘Best Cruise vessel in the world’ for the 13th consecutive year and therefore the pressure was on to deliver the trees onto the vessel during its port call in Cape Town. Due to the fact that other European air carriers could not move this delicate cargo, we asked our partners at Southampton Freight Services if they could assist.”

Tags: Hapag-Lloyd