Sea-Intelligence said the Strait of Hormuz disruption did not register as a global negative event, with global schedule reliability in March 2026 rising by 3.9 percentage points above normal pre-pandemic seasonal baselines, while the Red Sea crisis created a measurable drag on global schedule reliability.
The analysis drew a sharp distinction between the two disruptions. Sea-Intelligence said the Red Sea crisis worked as a transit-time penalty, whereas the Hormuz blockade created a hard volume shock. Rather than leaving ships at indefinite anchorage, carriers exited the blocked network, leading to a near-total collapse in vessel arrivals to the Middle East.
That response shifted the disruption ashore. Carriers offloaded diverted Middle East-bound pipeline cargo at the nearest viable hubs outside the blockade, including India’s west coast and Colombo in Sri Lanka.
The unplanned discharge volumes overwhelmed yard space and created landside bottlenecks, hitting schedule reliability on unrelated trade lanes using the same transhipment hubs.
Sea-Intelligence said the data showed how a localized maritime blockade can rapidly turn into a severe landside yard-congestion crisis, even when the initial effect is not reflected as a global deterioration in aggregate schedule reliability.
Sea-Intelligence is a Denmark-based maritime data analysis and advisory company focused on liner shipping, schedule reliability, network design, port performance and carrier strategy. It publishes recurring market analysis and operational datasets for the container shipping sector.
