Congestion is treated by many shippers as bad luck. In practice it concentrates: around known peak seasons, around weather windows, around single-berth terminals, and around the handful of transhipment points where a missed connection costs a full sailing rather than a day. Those are all knowable in advance.
We plan for it by building slack where it is cheap and removing it where it is expensive. That means booking earlier into constrained lanes, keeping a second routing genuinely live rather than theoretical, and being honest with clients about which dates are firm and which are aspirational. A schedule that quietly assumes everything runs to plan is not a schedule — it is a hope.
Harbour Strategies (HK) Limited · 16 September 2025
Editorial commentary by Harbour Strategies. Figures and regulatory details should be verified against primary sources before being relied upon.
