Drewry counts 79 void sailings in 721 East-West loops, an 11% blank rate

The number that landed this week is the kind that should make any importer stop and recheck their booking sheet before they confirm the next shipment. Drewry tracked 721 planned sailings across the four main east-west trade lanes between September 14 and October 18, and 79 of those sailings were cancelled. That works out to an 11% blank sailing rate. On its own, eleven percent sounds like noise, but it is not noise when you remember how the container network actually operates. Carriers run their fleets hot, with almost no spare capacity sitting idle, so when one sailing in nine quietly disappears the cargo that was booked on it does not get magically absorbed by a neighbour ship. It has to roll to the next departure, and the next departure is already nearly full because the whole system is stretched.

Look at where the cuts landed, because the average hides the part that hurts you. Of the 79 blanked sailings, transpacific eastbound accounted for 52%, which is 41 sailings, and Asia-Europe together with the Mediterranean took 33%, another 26 sailings. Put those two groups together and you get 85% of all the cancellations sitting on the exact lanes that carry most of our boxes. The other east-west lanes barely felt it. So if your routings are north Asia to the US west coast, or Asia to North Europe, you are living in the part of the map where the carriers are pulling steel out of the water, not adding it.

The timing is not an accident. Golden Week is the Chinese holiday stretch where factory output dips and booking demand softens for a couple of weeks, and the carriers have learned to pre-empt that softness by cancelling sailings in advance. They would rather sail half-empty ships at a rate they control than fill ships and watch the rate collapse. That is a perfectly sensible commercial move if you own the vessels. If you are the one trying to get forty containers to a customer before a promotion, it means the space you assume is waiting for you is actually being quietly withdrawn, week by week, right when your shipment is most likely to be ready to go.

Here is the part that worries me more than the blank count by itself. Sea-Intelligence measured global schedule reliability for July at just 56.4%. Think about that number for a second. It means that even when your sailing is not cancelled, you have worse than a coin-flip chance of it arriving when the carrier said it would. And the ships that did run late were late by an average of 6.06 days. So the realistic planning case is not a clean transit plus a small buffer. The realistic case is a cancelled sailing or a six-day late arrival, and you get to find out which one only after you have committed the cargo.

Stack those two facts on top of each other and the picture gets uncomfortable. An 11% blank rate tells you that one in nine ships will not sail at all. A 56.4% reliability rate tells you that of the eight that do sail, fewer than six will show up on time. Multiply those and your odds of a clean, on-time arrival on the sailing you originally booked drop well below half. I have watched teams build their entire quarterly delivery plan on the published schedule, then watch it fall apart in the last two weeks because nobody priced in the blank-and-late combination. That is the trap this window sets, and it is a trap because both numbers look manageable in isolation.

Then there is the Rhine, and I want to be clear that this is not a separate story for anyone routing through North Europe. The Kaub gauge, which is the shallowest pinch on the river that everyone watches, dropped to 28 centimeters on September 15. Twenty-eight centimeters is the level where barge operators either stop running or load so light that the economics fall apart. A huge share of the containers that feed Rotterdam and Antwerp, and a huge share of the inland cargo moving to and from those ports, rides the Rhine. When the river gets this low, the cost and the delay leak straight into your ocean booking whether you ship by barge or not, because the whole backhaul system tightens and everyone crowds onto the same trucks and trains at the same moment.

Let me put numbers on this with a worked example, because the percentages hide the real hit to a specific business. Assume you are a mid-size importer moving 40 FEU a month on the transpacific eastbound lane, the lane that took 52% of the blanks. Assume each FEU carries about 50,000 dollars of goods, so your in-transit pipeline is roughly 2 million dollars at any moment. Assume a normal sailing cadence of about eight eastbound departures a week across the carriers you use. With 41 eastbound blanks over the five-week window Drewry tracked, that is a cancelled sailing roughly every day and a half on your lane alone. If even two of your booked sailings get blanked in a month, those boxes roll to the next ship, and at 56.4% reliability the next ship is itself a coin flip to be on time.

Now run the money on that rollover. Two FEU rolled by even six days, the current average delay, is 100,000 dollars of goods sitting on a dock instead of on a shelf. At a 10% annual cost of capital that is about 0.027% a day, so 100,000 times 0.027% times six days is roughly 162 dollars of pure carry cost, before you count the premium you will pay to rebook onto a tighter ship or the air freight you panic into when a retail date slips. Across a quarter, with two rollovers a month, that is close to a thousand dollars of carry cost plus the operational mess, and that assumes only two sailings hit. At an 11% blank rate the realistic number is higher, and the premium rebooking is where the real money leaks, not the carry.

The Rhine piece adds a second tax that most importers forget to book. When Kaub is at 28 centimeters, barge capacity into Rotterdam and Antwerp shrinks, so the containers that would have moved cheaply by water get pushed onto truck or rail at a premium, or they simply wait. Either way the landed cost on North European cargo creeps up at exactly the moment space is tight. If you are importing into North Europe, do not treat the Rhine as somebody else's problem. The low water is a leading indicator that your backhaul is about to get expensive or slow, and it lands on the same window as the blank sailings, so the two taxes arrive together and compound.

So what do you actually do this week. Begin by locking space now rather than waiting for the week before sailing. With an 11% blank baseline the old habit of booking late and assuming a slot exists will get you rolled, and there is no spare ship to catch. Talk to your carrier or NVO about guaranteed allocations on the specific sailings you depend on, and get the price in writing, because a guaranteed slot costs more but it is cheaper than a rolled shipment and a missed shelf date. I have seen a team save a few hundred dollars on an unguaranteed rate and then lose a promotion because the box missed the week, and the math on that loss made the saving look like a rounding error.

Next, spread your risk across carriers and windows instead of putting all 40 FEU on one sailing. If one of eight weekly departures goes blank, having boxes on three different carriers means you can shuffle without a total miss. This looks inefficient on paper, and it is, but efficiency is what got us into the rollover problem in the first place. A little redundancy on the booking sheet is the cheapest insurance you can buy when the baseline itself is 11% thin, and it costs far less than the air freight you would otherwise panic-book when a sailing vanishes.

After that, rebuild your own lead time math around the reliability number, not the published schedule. If reliability is 56.4% and average delay is 6.06 days, stop quoting customers the clean transit time. Quote the clean time plus a buffer, and hold that safety stock at the receiving distribution centre, not spread across every warehouse you own. The buffer belongs on the lane that is actually volatile, not parked in a building that never sees a delayed box. Putting safety stock everywhere is just converting a shipping problem into a rent problem, and it hides the real cause instead of fixing it.

Also, watch the Rhine as a leading indicator for North European costs and pre-arrange truck or rail alternatives before the low water forces everyone into the same backup at the same time. Kaub at 28 centimeters is a warning that barge-based backhaul is about to get expensive, and the carriers and forwarders who move early will have the trucks; the ones who wait will be quoting you spot rates during a crowd. If your cargo lands in Rotterdam or Antwerp, line up the land bridge now, not when the river is the story on the front page, because by then the cheap capacity is already gone.

One more thing for the exporter side of the desk, because this cuts both ways. If you are shipping outbound on these lanes, the same blank rate means your delivered date to the buyer is now a coin flip on reliability. Book the slot, bake the buffer into the quoted lead time, or take the late penalty. And keep an eye on the Golden Week timing, because the carriers are clearly willing to pull capacity exactly when your shipment is most likely to be ready. The exporter who plans around the blank window keeps the customer; the one who assumes the schedule ships as published loses them, and in a tight market the lost customer is the one your competitor picked up the same week.

The throughline is simple and it is the same advice I would give a friend over coffee. Eleven percent blanks plus 56.4% reliability plus a 28 centimeter Rhine is a market where the safe move is to assume disruption and plan around it, not hope it misses you. Lock early, spread the bookings, hold the buffer where the volatility lives, and keep one eye on the river. That is the play for this window, and it is cheaper than the alternative by a margin wide enough to notice on the quarterly sheet.

One practical detail that gets overlooked is how a blank sailing actually shows up on your desk. The carrier or NVO sends a cancellation notice for a specific voyage number, often a week or two before the planned departure, and if your boxes were allocated to that voyage they are now homeless. The mistake most teams make is treating that notice as information rather than as a trigger. The moment a blank lands on a sailing you depend on, you should already have a pre-agreed fallback voyage with the same carrier or a neighbour carrier, because by the time you start calling around, the neighbour ships are full. I tell clients to keep a standing line in the booking file: if voyage A blanks, roll to voyage B, do not ask. That one line saves more shipments than any fancy dashboard.

For the transpacific eastbound importer specifically, the timing lands right on top of US holiday stock building. Golden Week blanks arrive in early October, which is exactly when you are trying to land goods for the late-season push. A box that rolls in early October does not just arrive late, it arrives after the selling window, which is worse than never shipping it because the warehouse and the working capital are both already committed. If your product is date-sensitive to the US holiday calendar, the 11% blank rate is not a logistics footnote, it is a revenue risk, and it deserves a named owner on your team rather than a shared shrug across the desk.

The Mediterranean piece of that 33% deserves its own sentence, because importers routing to Italy, Spain or Turkey via the Med often assume they sit on a separate, calmer lane. They do not. The combined Asia-Med cancellation share lives inside that 33%, and the Med port calls are longer and more exposed to labour disruption than the North European ones. If your cargo discharges at a Mediterranean gateway, add the port-specific delay on top of the blank and reliability numbers, because a box that arrives on a blanked-then-late ship still has to clear a gateway that may itself be congested. The safe assumption is that the Med adds a layer, not removes one.

Negotiating the guaranteed allocation is where the real skill sits. A guaranteed slot is only as good as the contract behind it, and too many shippers accept a verbal assurance that evaporates the moment capacity is tight. Get the allocation in writing with the voyage numbers, the volume, and a no-roll clause, and confirm it is a hard allocation, not a soft preference. Pay the premium if you must, but know what you are buying. A written guaranteed allocation on a 56.4% reliability lane is worth more than three unguaranteed quotes that all promise the same thing and deliver none of it.

And don't let this turn into a permanent state of panic. The point of locking space, spreading bookings, and holding the right buffer is to let you stop thinking about the ocean every day. Build the disciplined version of the plan once, write the fallback lines into the booking file, and then the 11% blank rate becomes a managed cost instead of a monthly surprise. The importers who thrive in a disrupted market are not the ones with the most luck, they are the ones who turned disruption into a routine. That is the whole game.

One more operational point about communication, because silence is what turns a blank sailing into a lost customer. When you have locked guaranteed space and spread the bookings, tell your own customers the real lead time, not the hopeful one. A buyer who knows a shipment may shift by a week can plan around it; a buyer who is promised the clean transit and then gets a late box feels betrayed and starts dual-sourcing. The carriers create the disruption, but how you communicate it decides whether you keep the account. I have seen more relationships lost to a surprised customer than to the delay itself, and in a market running at 56.4% reliability the honest call is the retention tool.

For the finance side, the blank rate also changes how you should think about inventory financing. When transit is volatile, the capital tied up in goods-in-motion is harder to forecast, and a banker who underwrites your facility on a clean thirty-day cycle will be surprised by the reality. Show them the 11% blank and 6.06-day delay numbers up front, build the buffer into the borrowing base, and you avoid a covenant surprise in the quarter when a sailing vanishes. The importers who brief their lenders on the real lead-time distribution sleep better than the ones who hope the lender never asks. Author Leo.

• Lock guaranteed space now on the specific sailings you depend on; an 11% blank baseline leaves no spare ship to catch a rollover.
• Spread 40 FEU a month across at least three carriers and windows so one blanked sailing is not a total miss.
• Rebuild every quoted lead time around 56.4% reliability and 6.06 days average delay, not the published schedule.
• Hold safety stock only at the receiving DC on the volatile lane, not across every warehouse.
• Pre-arrange truck or rail backhaul into Rotterdam and Antwerp before Kaub low water forces a spot-rate crowd.
• Exporters: book the slot or add the buffer explicitly to quoted delivered dates through the Golden Week window.