Liner Reliability Is Splitting in Two: Core Trades Hold While Regional Networks Collapse

Global schedule reliability nudged up to 63.1% in the second quarter. The average hides a widening gulf between protected mainlines and abandoned regional services.

An Average That Conceals a Split

Global schedule reliability improved 2.2 percentage points to 63.1% in Q2 2026, still well below the 70–80% pre-pandemic band, with late vessels arriving an average of 5.49 days behind schedule, per Sea-Intelligence's Global Liner Performance analysis. The headline improvement is real, but it is also misleading.

Carriers bought reliability on the trades that matter most to them by starving the ones that do not. Maersk led at 76.9%, ahead of Hapag-Lloyd at 75.6% and MSC at 70.9% — all comfortably above a global mean that regional services are dragging down.

How Carriers Are Rationing Reliability

Faced with Middle East and Africa routing risk, carriers concentrated schedule integrity on the six major east–west mainlines while regional lanes posted their worst reliability on record — Asia–Africa at 34.3% and Europe–Africa at 30.2% — even as the Gemini cooperation cleared above 90% on core trades.

The Gemini Signal

Gemini's hub-and-spoke design — fewer direct port pairs, more transhipment — is delivering mainline reliability at the explicit cost of feeder complexity. That is a deliberate architecture choice, and on the metric carriers are actually graded on, it is beating the point-to-point network model.

Where the Delay Actually Lands

A 5.49-day average delay sits close to the worst second-quarter readings of the pandemic era. For a shipper on an Asia–Africa or intra-regional string, the lived experience is materially worse than the global number implies, and buffer stock and booking lead times have to widen accordingly.

The industry did not get more reliable this quarter. It decided which customers' reliability to protect — and which to sacrifice.

The Benign Reading

There is a case that this is rational triage, not decay. Prioritising high-value mainlines during an acute geopolitical shock preserves the most economically important flows, and regional reliability should recover once Red Sea and Gulf routing normalises. On this view the two-tier split is a temporary wartime posture, and the sequential improvement is the leading edge of a broader recovery.

What Shippers and Planners Should Do

For BCOs on core trades, reliability is improving — so concentrate volume with the top-quartile carriers and alliances actually delivering it, and price the gap into carrier scorecards. For regional and Africa-facing shippers, assume degraded reliability persists through the disruption: widen lead times, hold buffer inventory, and build transhipment risk into service-level expectations.

For network planners, the core-versus-regional spread — not the global average — is the true health indicator. The average will mislead you in both directions, flattering the mainlines and hiding the collapse at the edges.