Analysis from Sea-Intelligence, reported via The Loadstar, shows that major carriers are now routinely withdrawing between 10% and 14% of scheduled east-west capacity through blanked (cancelled) sailings — and that this has become standard commercial practice rather than an occasional response to a demand shock.

What's notable is the trend line: the volume of capacity removed through blanked sailings has grown faster than overall fleet capacity since 2019. In other words, carriers are managing supply more actively and more aggressively than the raw vessel numbers alone would suggest.

For shippers, this changes what a 'confirmed booking' really means in practice. A sailing can be blanked with relatively short notice, and the cargo originally booked onto it gets rolled onto a later vessel — which can turn what looked like a reliable transit time into a much longer one, particularly during peak periods.

The practical response is to build more flexibility into planning rather than treating a single sailing date as fixed. That can mean booking earlier than feels necessary, keeping a wider window in delivery commitments to end customers, and asking forwarders directly about a carrier's recent blanking patterns on a given trade lane before committing to it.

None of this is really new behaviour from carriers — but the scale and consistency of it does appear to have shifted. Shippers who are still planning around pre-2020 assumptions about sailing reliability are likely to be caught out more often than they'd like.

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