Feature, Logistics, Sea

Safmarine revamps West Africa routes

[ August 25, 2011   //   Chris ]

Safmarine has introduced three new Europe/West Africa services and has reorganised a number of its existing routes. The three new services all operate from the transhipment hub at Algericas in southern Spain and also serve Port Tangier Mediterranee (Morocco).

The new WAF 11 route serves Lome (Togo) and Onne (Nigeria), WAF 12 serves Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and Cotonou (Benin) and WAF 13 runs direct to Dakar (Senegal). Connections are also available to and from the entire Safmarine network in Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.

Safmarine’s Africa Trade Director, Dirk Geens, said that the changes had been made to improve transit times and reliability, adding: “Increasing the number of services overall has not only allowed us to reduce the number of port calls on some of the existing West African services, but it will also give us greater flexibility when it comes to handling volume overflows.”

As a result of the changes, transit times from Algeciras to Onne have decreased from 21 to 14 days and from Algeciras to Cotonou from 20 to 12 days.