Two schedule reliability reports covering June 2026 are now public. Sea-Intelligence puts global on-time arrivals at 62.6%. Xeneta puts them at 37%. The reports cover the same month and differ by 25.6 percentage points.
The practical question is what an operations team should do when a customer asks for a transit commitment and two widely cited measures of arrival performance sit this far apart.
The Same Month, Two Different Numbers
Sea-Intelligence published issue 179 of its Global Liner Performance report on 27 July, covering June 2026. Global schedule reliability came in at 62.6%, down 1.9 percentage points from May and 4.7 points from June 2025. The average delay for vessel arrivals classified as late improved by 0.34 days to 5.31 days.
Xeneta’s Q2 scorecard reported global schedule reliability of 37% in June, down 2 percentage points from May. It reported an average delay of 3.6 days. Xeneta’s subsequent July scorecard described the delay as rising from 3.5 days in June to 4.2 days in July, leaving a 0.1-day discrepancy between its own public releases.
| Month | Sea-Intelligence | Xeneta | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2026 | 62.6% | 37% | 25.6 percentage points |
| July 2026 | Not yet published | 33% | Not available |
Both Series Weakened in June
The month-on-month movements are close. Sea-Intelligence recorded a 1.9-point decline into June. Xeneta recorded a 2-point decline. Both measured weaker schedule performance, although their public releases do not establish that the deterioration had the same cause.
The agreement in direction extends beyond one month. Public releases from both providers show reliability declining into February, improving through March, April and May, and turning down again in June. The two benchmarks appear to detect some of the same broad changes in operating conditions even though their reported levels remain far apart.
That does not make the series interchangeable. A planner can compare movement within the Sea-Intelligence series or within the Xeneta series. Moving a percentage or month-on-month change from one provider’s scale into the other creates a comparison that the public methodology does not support.
What Each Provider Is Counting
Xeneta sources its schedule reliability data from eeSea, which it acquired in August 2025. Arrival times come from terrestrial and satellite AIS signals reconciled against carrier-published proforma schedules. The benchmark is the originally planned ETA, taken from the schedule at service launch or its latest structural update.
At service level, each included scheduled port call on a sailing that ran is scored against the original ETA. If a service records six on-time calls from ten included calls, its reliability score is 60%. Cancelled sailings are measured separately and are not counted as unreliable arrivals.
Xeneta classifies a vessel as on time when it arrives within one calendar day either side of the scheduled ETA. Early arrivals do not offset late arrivals in its delay measure. Xeneta treats them as null.
Sea-Intelligence’s current product documentation says the Global Liner Performance dataset covers more than 12,000 monthly vessel arrivals across more than 300 liner services, more than 60 carriers and 34 trade lanes.
In a publicly available 2019 methodology description, Sea-Intelligence defined an on-time arrival as one occurring within one calendar day before or after the scheduled arrival date. Its current public pages do not provide enough detail to confirm whether every underlying calculation rule remains unchanged in 2026.
Sea-Intelligence’s June delay figure of 5.31 days applies only to vessel arrivals already classified as late. Xeneta’s Q2 release reported a June average delay of 3.6 days, while its July release retrospectively put June at 3.5 days. The measures follow different aggregation rules and should not be combined into a common planning buffer.
Sea-Intelligence also used two alliance measures during the transition to the new alliance structures. “All arrivals” included every port call on the East-West trades, including origin-region calls. “Trade arrivals” counted destination-region arrivals only, preserving comparability with the earlier alliance structure.
For the December 2025 and January 2026 reporting period, Gemini Cooperation scored 89.5% under the all-arrivals measure and 88.3% under trade arrivals. Sea-Intelligence later said it would return to publishing trade arrivals only from its July 2026 Global Liner Performance issue. Older alliance figures therefore need a metric label before comparison.
The available public documentation reveals the broad calculation design used by both providers. It does not provide enough current detail on service coverage, weighting, exclusions, schedule revisions and aggregation to reproduce the 25.6-point global gap independently.
The June Gap Also Appears at Carrier Level
The difference is not limited to the global average. Public June figures for four named carriers also sit well apart.
| Carrier | Xeneta, June 2026 | Sea-Intelligence, June 2026 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maersk | 59% | 77.1% | 18.1 percentage points |
| Hapag-Lloyd | 57% | 75.6% | 18.6 percentage points |
| MSC | 32% | 72.1% | 40.1 percentage points |
| Wan Hai | 15% | 35.6% | 20.6 percentage points |
Among these four carriers, both providers place them in the same order. The reported levels still differ by between 18.1 and 40.1 percentage points.
The comparison supports a narrower conclusion than either ranking alone. The providers broadly agree on relative performance among these carriers, but a planner cannot move an absolute reliability percentage from one dataset into the other.
If you are being asked to defend a transit commitment and the only evidence available is a third-party monthly average you cannot inspect at service level, see how operations teams build an arrival record from their own container events.
Where July Landed
Inside Xeneta’s own series, July produced a sharper deterioration. Global schedule reliability fell another 4 percentage points to 33%. The spread between the strongest and weakest ranked carriers widened from 44 points in June to 49 points in July. Every carrier in the ranking except ZIM declined, with falls ranging from 2 to 13 points.
| Carrier | June 2026 | July 2026 | Monthly change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maersk | 59% | 57% | -2 points |
| Hapag-Lloyd | 57% | 52% | -5 points |
| MSC | 32% | 27% | -5 points |
| HMM | 27% | 14% | -13 points |
| Wan Hai | 15% | 8% | -7 points |
Maersk remained at the top of Xeneta’s ranking at 57%, down 2 percentage points from June. Hapag-Lloyd, its Gemini Cooperation partner, fell 5 points to 52%.
HMM recorded the steepest decline, falling 13 points to 14% of arrivals on time.
Wan Hai sat at the bottom with 8% on-time arrivals and an average delay of 7.3 days, up 1.9 days from June. Xeneta described it as the carrier’s weakest month in five years of its data.
The Port Queues Underneath
Xeneta’s July regional wait-time ranking puts Africa first at 2.9 days of average vessel wait, followed by the Mediterranean at 2.8 days. Northern Europe climbed from sixth place in May to third in July at 2.6 days, adding 1.2 days of average wait over two months.
Two gateways were running well above their regional averages in July. Algeciras recorded 10.3 days and Rotterdam recorded 7.4 days. Both handle large volumes of direct and transshipment cargo moving through European networks.
Rotterdam matters for a second reason. FNV Havens has called a stoppage from 11:15 to 19:00 on Friday 4 September across Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Vlissingen and Terneuzen.
The stoppage is scheduled at a port where Xeneta measured a 7.4-day average vessel wait in July. That figure does not predict conditions on 4 September, but it shows how elevated recent waiting times have been. We covered the sequence and what tends to move first in our note on the Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Zeeland port strike.
What to Check Before You Quote a Transit Time
- Record the provider and reporting month whenever a reliability figure enters a quote, scorecard or contract clause. A bare percentage is not portable between reports.
- Compare changes within one provider’s series. Do not splice a Sea-Intelligence level or month-on-month movement into a Xeneta comparison, or vice versa.
- Use agreement in direction as corroborating context, rather than evidence that the providers share a common scale.
- For older Sea-Intelligence alliance figures, check whether the percentage refers to all arrivals or trade arrivals. The transitional measures were not identical.
- Do not build a planning buffer directly from either delay average. Sea-Intelligence’s 5.31 days applies only to arrivals already classified as late. Xeneta’s figure follows a different aggregation design and excludes early arrivals from offsetting late ones. Neither measure describes the upper tail that an inventory plan may need to survive.
- Pull your own last twelve months of original ETA against actual arrival by service and lane. That record is closer to the containers you are being asked to commit to than a global carrier average.
The wider point about lane and service choice, and why a global average is a weak proxy for either, sits in our earlier read on which container trade lanes are now the hardest to plan around.
Need help interpreting this disruption or your shipment?
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Prefer email? Contact us directly at min.so@tradlinx.com (Americas), sondre.lyndon@tradlinx.com (Europe), or henry.jo@tradlinx.com (EMEA/Asia).
Further Reading
- Xeneta Schedule Reliability Scorecard, July 2026, Xeneta, 6 August 2026
- Xeneta Schedule Reliability Scorecard, Q2 2026, Xeneta
- Schedule Reliability in Xeneta for Ocean Freight, Xeneta documentation
- Our Data: Reliability, Xeneta
- Xeneta Acquires eeSea, Xeneta, August 2025
- Global Schedule Reliability Drops to 62.6% in June 2026, Sea-Intelligence GLP issue 179, 27 July 2026
- 2026 Starts with Global Schedule Reliability of 62.4%, Sea-Intelligence GLP issue 174
- Global Schedule Reliability for May 2026 the Highest of the Year, Sea-Intelligence
- Sea-Intelligence Global Liner Performance, Sea-Intelligence product documentation
- Sunday Spotlight Issue 397: Schedule Reliability in 2018, Sea-Intelligence, 27 January 2019
- Port of Rotterdam Faces Strike Action on 4 September, WorldCargo News, 4 August 2026
Sea-Intelligence figures are drawn from Global Liner Performance issues 174 and 179, its May 2026 release, current product documentation and a publicly available 2019 methodology description. Xeneta figures are drawn from its Q2 and July 2026 Schedule Reliability Scorecards and public methodology documentation, with reliability data sourced from eeSea. Xeneta’s Q2 scorecard reports June average delay at 3.6 days, while its July scorecard retrospectively uses 3.5 days. Public methodology documents disclose the broad calculation design but do not provide enough current coverage and weighting detail to reconcile the difference between the global percentages. Confirm service-level performance against your own arrival records before resetting buffers or contractual transit commitments.
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