The Ocean Alliance is putting Tacoma back on the map. Evergreen's HTW service will again call at the Washington port, restoring direct coverage of the US Pacific Northwest that the loop dropped at the start of 2026.

That removal had left the HTW string with a thin US footprint: Los Angeles and Oakland were the only American calls on the rotation for the period in between. For shippers moving cargo into the Pacific Northwest, the absence of a direct option on this loop meant inland routing via California or a shift to other services — added cost and added transit time either way.

The restored rotation, as tracked by DynaLiners, now reads: Laem Chabang – Cai Mep – Taipei – Kaohsiung – Yantian – Los Angeles – Oakland – Tacoma – Kaohsiung – Laem Chabang.

Read that loop and the commercial logic is straightforward. The service strings together the major Southeast Asian gateways — Laem Chabang in Thailand and Cai Mep in Vietnam — with the Taiwanese transshipment hubs of Taipei and Kaohsiung, then Yantian in South China. On the US side, it now touches three distinct demand centres: Southern California through Los Angeles, Northern California through Oakland, and the Pacific Northwest through Tacoma.

For importers and forwarders serving Seattle-Tacoma-area distribution networks, the change is meaningful. Tacoma gives Vietnam-, Thailand- and South China-origin cargo a direct Pacific Northwest discharge point again, without a California port call standing between origin and destination. The restructuring retains every existing US call, so Southern and Northern California shippers see no loss of coverage in exchange.

For Evergreen, which operates the loop within the Ocean Alliance vessel-sharing arrangement, the move signals a vote of confidence in Pacific Northwest demand. Carriers that cut PNW calls typically do so to consolidate volume into fewer, denser port pairs when utilization is soft; reversing that cut points to cargo flows strong enough to support the extra call.

Tacoma itself gains a tangible piece of business: an additional direct Asia service calling at its terminals, competing for the import and export volumes that otherwise might have moved through Los Angeles or Oakland and drayed or railed north.

The Ocean Alliance context matters here. The grouping — which pairs CMA CGM, COSCO Shipping, Evergreen and their partners on shared strings — routinely rebalances port coverage across its network as seasonal and structural demand shifts. This is an adjustment within an existing service rather than a new deployment, which usually means a faster operational changeover than a fresh loop launch would require.

Shippers with cargo booked on the HTW should watch their carriers' revised schedules closely. A rotation change of this kind resets transit times both ways: Pacific Northwest-bound cargo gets faster direct routing, while cargo to Los Angeles and Oakland may see its schedule shift slightly as the loop absorbs the additional Tacoma call and the repositioning leg back through Kaohsiung to Laem Chabang.

Whether the restored call holds will depend on utilization on the Pacific Northwest leg. DynaLiners' tracking of the change suggests the decision is locked into the published rotation for now — and if PNW volumes hold up, the direct Southeast Asia-to-Tacoma link should be a fixture rather than a stopgap.