As we anticipated last week, we are nearing the point where the carriers need to ramp up the amount of blank sailings for Q3. Whilst it is understandable that one would like to have a glimmer of hope that we will see a pick-up by the Q3 peak-season, it appears ever more unlikely to happen in the short term.
This week saw the 2M alliance ext the cancellation of the Transpacific TP11/Elephant service to of July. This is a continuation of the blanking strategy we have seen from 2M since early in the pandemic, where they prefer to blank an entire service for an exted period of time. It is also not surprising, that it is an already blanked service which is being exted. When an alliance removes an entire service for a longer period of time, this must be because they have made the assessment, that this is a service where the gaps in the network can best be covered by other services ¨C and as such makes it logical to ext cancellations on such a service.
In a similar vein, Hapag-Lloyd exts the cancellation of the Gothenburg Express until further notice. This has been cancelled since April.
This in turn means that in the coming weeks market participants should prepare for cancellations in July of the same services, as have already seen substantial cancellations. For services not yet blanked, the following might well see substantial blanking sailings shortly:
On the Transpacific to the US East Coast this would particularly point to the THE Alliance service EC3 and to the West Coast it would point to 2M¡¯s TP8/Orient and THE Alliance¡¯s PS5 service.
As always, data on this changes by the week, and the above is based on data available as of May 29th at 17:30 CET.
