Blank sailings are climbing again: book the hull that still shows up

Capacity management is back in the headlines: blank sailings rising on the main East–West trades as lines defend rates into a soft market. For a freight desk, a blanked sailing is a schedule that looked bookable yesterday and is gone today.

The desk’s take: the timetable is the carrier’s intention, not its record. When blanking picks up, the gap between the two widens, and the only defence is to book on the lane’s actual on-time history, not the brochure. A sailing that habitually keeps its word is worth more than one that’s a day faster on paper and routinely pulled.

What to do with it: when you compare options, weight reliability as heavily as transit and price, and treat a thin or worsening on-time record as the warning it is.

That’s the whole point of a SchedulesMCP sailing card: reliability scored from arrivals we actually observed, grouped by the physical vessel, so you book the hull that shows up.