New analysis from Sea-Intelligence reveals a deeply divided picture of schedule reliability across global shipping trade lanes.
Some corridors are achieving high stability while others remain structurally volatile. The findings, published in Issue 765 of the Sea-Intelligence Sunday Spotlight, show that the global average for service-level schedule reliability obscures significant divergence between trade lanes.
Rather than uniform performance, the market has split between routes with a high proportion of stable services and those where volatility remains elevated.
The divide is particularly evident across the two primary Asia-Europe trades, which have followed markedly different trajectories.
Asia-Mediterranean has emerged as the industry’s strongest performer in reliability. Following a turbulent network reshuffle in early 2025, during which high-volatility services peaked, the trade lane stabilised considerably.
By February 2026, 33 per cent of services on the route were classified as Gold Standard, denoting high reliability and low volatility, while so-called Chaos Loops, a measure of network instability, fell to just 5 per cent.
READ: Liner schedule reliability hits 62.2 per cent in March
Asia-North Europe tells a different story. After reaching a 40 per cent Gold Standard share in September 2025, that figure dropped sharply to 14 per cent by February 2026.
However, the decline did not translate into a surge in volatile services. Instead, 81 per cent of the trade lane now sits within what Sea-Intelligence terms the Operational Middle, and with Chaos Loops falling to zero per cent, Asia-North Europe has become the most predictable trade lane across the main east-west network.
For more information:
Sea-Intelligence – https://www.sea-intelligence.com/
