Danish maritime data analysis company Sea-Intelligence has examined schedule reliability data up to August 2024.
In August 2024, global schedule reliability improved slightly by 0.7% points month-on-month (M/M), reaching 52.8%. Despite being relatively low, schedule reliability in 2024 has remained stable within the 50%-55% range, offering shippers some consistency in expectations each month.
However, on a year-on-year (Y/Y) basis, August 2024 saw a significant decline of 10.2% points. The average delay for late vessel arrivals also increased marginally by 0.03 days M/M, rising to 5.28 days—just short of the peaks seen during the pandemic in 2021-2022. Compared to the previous year, this figure reflects a 0.62-day increase.
Maersk was the most reliable top-13 carrier in August 2024 with schedule reliability of 54.7%, followed by Hapag-Lloyd with 54.3%, according to the analysis. Another eight carriers were above the 50% mark, with PIL the least reliable at 37.2%.
In August 2024, the schedule reliability difference between the most and least reliable carrier increased to 17.5 percentage points, the highest figure in all of 2024. There were nine carriers with an M/M improvement in schedule reliability in August 2024, with HMM recording the largest increase of 7.4 percentage points.
On a Y/Y level, only HMM and Yang Ming recorded an improvement of 4.4 and 3.6 percentage points, while there were six carriers with double-digit Y/Y declines.