In Sea-Intelligence’s 2026 monthly reports, global schedule reliability has run between 59.0% and 64.7% — meaning roughly one vessel in three arrived late, and the late ones averaged about 5.5 days behind schedule. At those rates, lateness is not an exception; it is an operating condition. Planning for it means treating every ETA as perishable: re-baseline the date when events move it, and make sure your customer hears the new date from you first.
What does the 2026 reliability data say?
| Figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 59.0–64.7% | Global schedule reliability, monthly readings across 2026 | Sea-Intelligence |
| ~1 in 3 | Vessels arriving late, implied by those monthly figures | Sea-Intelligence |
| ~5.5 days | Average delay when a vessel does arrive late | Sea-Intelligence |
| 3–18% | Scheduled departures blanked, depending on the window | Drewry Cancelled Sailings Tracker |
SEA-INTELLIGENCE GLOBAL LINER PERFORMANCE, 2026 MONTHLY REPORTS · DREWRY CANCELLED SAILINGS TRACKER, 2026
Read the middle rows together and the shape of the problem appears: a third of arrivals miss the date, and when they miss they miss by most of a week. This is not a bad-month anomaly — it is the range the monthly readings have moved inside all year.
Why do printed ETAs decay?
Because the ETA on the booking confirmation is a plan, and the ocean disagrees with plans one leg at a time. A port omission here, a slipped transshipment connection there, congestion at the discharge port — each moves the arrival, and blank sailings (3–18% of scheduled departures in 2026, per Drewry, depending on the window measured) remove the departure entirely. The date your customer wrote into their delivery schedule was accurate on the day you sent it. The question is who notices when it stops being accurate — you, or them.
What does proactive re-baselining mean?
Three moves, in order. Notice the event that moved the plan — the vessel that departed late, the connection that slipped, the omitted port call. Recompute everything downstream of it: the transshipment connection, the arrival, the delivery window that depended on the old date. Tell first: send the new date, with the reason, on the customer’s channel before they discover the slip themselves. A dashboard that turns a row red does the first move and stops; the desk runs all three, and your team approves what goes out. The mechanics are on how it works.
How do you plan a desk around one-in-three?
Do the arithmetic on your own book. With 200 containers on the water, roughly 65 will arrive late, each by ~5.5 days on average — and every one of them is a customer conversation that either you start or your customer does. That volume is why “we’ll call them when something big happens” quietly becomes “they call us”. Run your monthly shipment count through the calculator to see what the conversations cost today, and see the guide for the full exception taxonomy behind the delays.
Put the watch on your boxes.
Everything on this page runs live in a working tracking desk. Bring ten shipments on the water and watch the updates land before the questions do.
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