Disruption occurrences in liner shipping operations affect schedule reliability and may increase the total cost of delivering cargoes at ports. If a vessel experiences disruption occurrences either at ports of call or in sea, the liner shipping company is required to decide on the schedule recovery action to execute in order to recover the resulting delays. This study formulates a novel mathematical model for the vessel schedule recovery problem (VSRP) in liner shipping. The objective aims to minimize the total profit loss, suffered by the liner shipping company due to disruption occurrences at a given liner shipping route. A total of four recovery strategies are considered in the model, which include: (1) vessel sailing speed adjustment; (2) vessel handling rate adjustment; (3) port skipping without container diversion; and (4) port skipping with container diversion. The proposed mathematical formulation for the nonlinear VSRP model is solved to the global optimality using BARON. A set of computational experiments are further performed for the Middle East/Pakistan/India-West Mediterranean (WM3) route, which is served by the OOCL liner shipping company, for various scenarios of disruption occurrences in sea and at ports. The results from the performed analyses demonstrate potential benefits for liner shipping companies from using the proposed methodology for various realistic scenarios of disruptions.