Shipping delays meant organisers were unable to commit to the festival date. Photo / Alex Burton
Shipping delays meant organisers were unable to commit to the festival date. Photo / Alex Burton
The organisers of a craft beer festival in Auckland say heavy congestion at New Zealand ports and shipping delays of up to five weeks have forced its postponement.
After cancelling their 2020 festival due to Covid-19, GABS (Great Australian Beer Spectacular) was scheduled to return to Auckland on July 3.
GABS Managing Director Mike Bray said they were gutted to be deferring the Auckland festival for a second time.
"We've got 200 kegs of festival beer all ready and good to go, all for New Zealand, so we've got to try and find a date very quickly and that's not too easy at the moment," he said.
"Shipping into Auckland and New Zealand full-stop seems to be a global challenge at the moment, not just a challenge for ourselves.
"And we want certainty, so I think what we're going to do is make sure we can get all our product into New Zealand and then work the dates subject to that delivery."
A statement posted on their website on Sunday said they would be deferring the July Auckland event and pausing ticket sales, due to shipping delays at New Zealand ports.
"The shipping situation between AU and NZ has apparently been rapidly deteriorating," read the statement.
It said there were delays in vessel sailing schedules of up to three–five weeks and "heavy congestion at almost every New Zealand port causing 10-day delays just to get serviced".
Even if the cargo made it to New Zealand there was no certainty of where it would end up, with some ships having to bypass Auckland and offload at Tauranga.
GABS organisers say shipping delays and port congestion have forced them to postpone the festival. Photo / Alex Burton
"You could be scheduled to dock into Auckland and then get moved to another dock because of the backlog in Auckland," Bray said.
He said shipper-owned containers, such as the ones their cargo travelled in, could also "get bumped at no notice" for carrier-owned containers.
The Auckland festival was scheduled three weeks after the Brisbane event, an achievable timeframe with a typical non-Covid shipping timeframe of 4 – 5 days.
But with a lack of certainty around shipping coupled with the recent Covid outbreak in Melbourne - where 40 per cent of their Australian staff worked - Bray said they had been forced to delay.
"In addition to this, the recent Covid outbreak in Victoria and subsequent travel ban on its residents to New Zealand further compounds our ability for some of our support team to travel to Auckland to deliver the best GABS experience possible."
The GABS (Great Australasian Beer Spectacular) festival in Melbourne. Photo / File
The GABS organisers said the highs and lows of event management during Covid were "agonizing".
"One weekend you have 20,000 craft beer loving fans like yourselves going off in Melbourne, the next week it's in lockdown and we can't get our team to Brisbane, let alone Auckland, one of our favourite cities," they said.
"We would like to give you every assurance that we are doing everything possible to make GABS happen this year."
