In issue 760 of the Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight, we evaluated port level schedule reliability between July 2025 and February 2026. A comparison between unweighted and volume‑weighted reliability averages revealed distinct internal variances. In North Europe, a five percentage‑point higher unweighted score indicated a clear ‘hub penalty’, suggesting that the largest transshipment hubs experienced lower schedule adherence than the region's secondary ports, thereby pulling down the volume‑weighted average.

To isolate these specific operational bottlenecks, schedule reliability at individual ports was indexed against the continental unweighted baseline to produce a 'Reliability Delta'. A negative delta demonstrates underperformance. Figure 1 illustrates this delta for North Europe.

The data reveals a distinct structural drag concentrated at the region's largest gateways. Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg – the three ports responsible for handling the vast majority of the region's vessel call volume – all recorded negative reliability deltas. Rotterdam received over 1,200 calls during the analysed period while lagging the European baseline by a delta of ‑1.5 percentage points. Antwerp handled a similar vessel call volume to Rotterdam but recorded a ‑4.6 percentage point delta. Hamburg proved particularly vulnerable, lagging the unweighted European baseline by over ten percentage points.

Conversely, this localised congestion at the primary gateways left Bremerhaven, Dunkirk, and Wilhelmshaven as the rare ports in the region maintaining positive deltas during the analysed period. These findings demonstrate that the primary hubs shippers traditionally rely upon suffer from persistent structural congestion, creating a severe hub penalty across the supply chain. Ports with massive throughput volume are currently exhibiting localised schedule degradation, meaning that defaulting to the largest transshipment ports is no longer a guarantee of high schedule reliability.

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 All quotes can be attributed to: Alan Murphy, CEO, Sea-Intelligence.
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