Blank sailings have traditionally been used by container shipping companies as a tool to manage supply and match demand. Deployed empty," says Sea-Intelligence in its latest report.

However, this was not the case with all alliance services. “To see how sensitive a service is to blank sailings, we introduced a measure called mean time between blank sailings (ATBBS),” said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence. "In fact, this is the average number of weeks between a blank sailing on each respective service."

The same is true for Ocean Alliance, where AEU2 and AEU6 were barely cleared in the past 12 months, while AEU7, AEU9 and AEU1 were cleared every 5-7 weeks during the same period, the report said. There was very little to choose from in THE Alliance's services, as they were all cleared quite often. We also saw similar patterns in Asia-Mediterranean.

“While the common understanding may be that blank sailings are made across the board, the reality is that carriers prefer certain services – either because of the choice and value of cargo aboard certain routes, because of the ports they call or a other external factor," Murphy says.

Having this information then serves as a very good guide for shippers as knowing which services are more likely to be suppressed (should similar operational issues arise in the future) would help them mitigate the additional disruption to their supply chain, the report added.