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.