A notable exception, which has been curiously ignored, apart from a passing citation by Ronen9, is that of Brown et al.10, whereby a ship multiple speed level mix is selected a priori, whilst defining the time spent at each selected speed level as a decision variable, resulting in set of decision variables and a linear programming model. Effectively, in this reformulation of the speed optimisation problem, a linear programming model replaces the traditional nonlinear programming model, which clearly is a significant advantage, both from a mathematical standpoint and a computational point of view. However, there does not exist a quantitative assessment of the results obtained for the same speed optimisation problem variant instance. It is precisely the objective of the work presented in this paper to provide such an assessment.