Schedule reliability drops to 56.7% in Dec

December data shows that schedule reliability dropped once again, although not as severely as in the previous month. "The decline was also reflected in the performance of individual carriers and on trade routes," says the latest update of seaexplorer from Kuehne+Nagel.

Schedule reliability reached 56.7 percent, dropping four percentage points from November. This is the second-lowest level for 2023, the update added. December's global on-time performance is in line with the December 2022 performance.

Adding a disclaimer, the update says: "Due to the situation in the Red Sea, carriers have diverted vessels around southern Africa. Those vessels with planned arrivals in December will now arrive in January. They are excluded from this month's data."

The average arrival delay of LATE vessels climbed slightly in December. Compared with November, the monthly average increased by 0.2 days to 3.9 days. Although below the four-day mark, December 2023 performance is just 0.4 days away from December 2022 levels.

Reliability per trade lane
The Transatlantic and Transpacific declined by four and six percentage points, respectively. "The schedule reliability on the Transatlantic dropped to 47.5 percent, ranking as the least reliable trade for December. In contrast, Mediterranean/ Black Sea-North America improved by four percentage points to 49.1 percent from 44.7 percent in November.

The trade with the most significant improvement was North Europe-South America, increasing by more than 30 percent month-on-month. Its on-time performance jumped to 73.9 percent from 56.4 percent in November.

The Mediterranean/Black Sea-South America holds its position as the best-performing trade for the month with a reliability of 79.9 percent.