On the strategic and tactical levels, the main challenge is the mobile nature of the supply points. Since ships change itineraries on a seasonal basis and are relocated given market demand, it poses the challenge of global re-supply. One interesting issue for cruise ship companies, as well as for very few other service industries, is the re-supplying of their operation globally at varying endpoints. In the cruise industry, one very interesting phenomenon is the shock to the supply chain due to the re-positioning of a ship’s port. The phenomenon was labelled ‘‘double loading’’ by employees of a cruise company. They refer to the re-positioning of ship season as the ‘‘double loading season’’. This is caused by a replenishment lead-time that increases as the ships get repositioned away from the supply source. Therefore a ship that had a replenishment lead- time of two days for its winter port in Miami will incur a lead-time change to four weeks when re-positioning to Europe. This change is mainly due to transportation lead-time. As a result, for the three weeks before arriving in Europe, the logistics centre and the com- pany’s suppliers have to process goods for the same ship twice every week, once locally and once in anticipation of the ship’s arrival in Europe. This phenomenon could only be attributed to varying endpoints, and no other reference to this specific issue could be found in supply chain literature. The shock felt at the distribution centre causes the operating hours at that centre to double and for overtime to be paid, and for this to ripple upstream all the way in the supply chain to suppliers. Fig. 2 shows the two main streams that re-supply ships.