Our Offices
Jacksonville
ComPair Data, Inc.
P.O. Box 1785
Jacksonville, FL 32201
Phone: +1.904.355.2601
Fax: +1.904.791.8836
Robert King, Sales
Stephen Wynn, DB Editor
Hayes Howard, President
London
European Shipper, LTD
16 Blunden Road
Farnborough, Hampshire
GU14 8QJ UK
Phone: +44 (0) 1252 545-333
Fax: +44 (0) 5603 116-944
Francis Phillips, DB Editor
Idea behind ComPair Data
ComPair Data, Inc. was formed in 1998 as an out growth of a project of American Shipper magazine. The project, conceived by David Howard, editor of American Shipper, was to build a print based schedule for all ocean carrier liner services in North America that would only take up eight pages in the monthly magazine.
The approach to liner schedules was different than any other that had been executed before or since in three respects.
1.) The schedules were comprehensive, rather than just covering services of companies that paid to be listed or advertised in the publication, all liner services would be included. This is still a unique feature of ComPair Data and assures users that every available service, on any of the 86 global trade routes in ComPair, is shown.
2.) The service information was based on vessel rotation data rather than carrier vessel/voyage schedules. This provided users with more accurate information on transit times and made it possible to track all services independently of carrier provided data.
3.) The schedule information was presented by service rather than carrier and in the service tag the carriers’ allocated space on the service were shown. This allowed users to get an accurate picture of the number of direct services available between two points and the comparative transit times between services..
The published schedules were not a financial success but several companies that found the analytical approach to evaluating ocean carrier services beneficial as a market analysis tool; asked American Shipper if an interactive version of the schedules could be built.
In 1998 ComPair Data was created and we tackled the project of converting the vision of David Howard into an interactive tool. With our development partners, a team was put together headed by Hayes Howard and Philip Damas from American Shipper and Steve Bushey and Mike Simon from Americas Systems and the logic required to make the system interactive was developed and the original database built. While the scope of the data was greatly expanded the primary principals which guided the creation of the original print schedules was maintained.
The information in the system will be accurate, updated constantly and audited quarterly.
The data will be comprehensive and no trade route will be promoted in the system until we are certain we can accurately track all services on the trade route.