Why I read schedules before press releases

Welcome to the first issue of Harbor Notes. I am Ines Varga, and for nine years I have read container schedules, tariffs and rate indices for a living, first at a forwarder in Rotterdam and then on my own. This newsletter is what I would have wanted on my desk back then: one issue a week, with one question and the working shown.

The question for this week is why I start with schedules. A press release tells you what a carrier wants you to believe about its network. A schedule tells you what it has committed to sail. When the two disagree, I trust the schedule, because changing it costs money and changing a sentence does not.

What a schedule contains

Each weekly service publishes a rotation, a vessel, and an estimated arrival and departure at every port. That is roughly 14 to 20 dated promises per sailing. Across the 40 or so services I follow on Asia to Europe and transpacific lanes, that comes to about 700 promises a week. I load them into a spreadsheet on Monday morning and compare them with the previous Monday’s version.

Two things show up quickly. One is a vessel swapped for a smaller one. The other is a port call dropped from the rotation. Neither appears in a press release, and each is visible two to three weeks before it reaches a freight rate.

What to expect here

Each Tuesday I will take one thing from the data and follow it. Some issues are free and some are for members, with the cut marked clearly. I will say when a figure is rough, and I will say when I am guessing. I will not name carriers when I am describing an error or a pattern, because the pattern is the point and a single bad week proves little.

A few terms will come up often. TEU is a twenty-foot container, the unit that capacity is counted in. A blank sailing is a scheduled departure that a carrier cancels. A rotation is the ordered list of ports a service calls at.

One thing to try

Pick one lane you ship on. Save its published schedule today, and save it again next Tuesday. Put the two side by side and look for anything that moved by more than a day. Most weeks nothing will. In about one week in five, something will, and you will know before your forwarder does.

Next Tuesday: how blank sailings are announced, and why the order of the announcements matters more than the number.