Major North European hubs are showing a clear reliability deficit in vessel scheduling, with Sea-Intelligence data indicating that the region’s largest gateways are consistently underperforming smaller ports between July 2025 and February 2026.
A comparison between unweighted and volume-weighted averages highlights a distinct internal variance across the region.
In North Europe, a five percentage-point higher unweighted reliability score indicates a clear ‘hub penalty’, suggesting that larger transshipment gateways experience lower schedule adherence than secondary ports, pulling down the overall volume-weighted average.
To isolate specific operational bottlenecks, individual port performance was indexed against the continental unweighted baseline to produce a “Reliability Delta”, where a negative value indicates underperformance.
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The data points to a structural drag concentrated at the region’s largest gateways. Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, which together handle the majority of regional vessel calls, recorded negative deltas over the period.
Rotterdam handled more than 1,200 vessel calls but lagged the European baseline by -1.5 percentage points.
Antwerp, with a comparable call volume, recorded a -4.6 percentage point delta, while Hamburg showed the steepest underperformance, trailing the baseline by more than 10 percentage points.
By contrast, Bremerhaven, Dunkirk, and Wilhelmshaven were among the few ports to record positive deltas, indicating relatively stronger schedule reliability during the same period.
The findings suggest persistent structural congestion at the region’s core hubs, with higher throughput ports exhibiting weaker schedule adherence.
This reduces the reliability advantage typically associated with major transshipment gateways, indicating that scale alone is no longer a guarantee of schedule performance in North Europe.
In a separate development, global container carriers recorded a combined EBIT of $15.4 billion in 2025, reflecting a moderation in earnings but avoiding a sharp downturn, according to analysis from Sea-Intelligence.
For more information:
Sea-Intelligence – https://www.sea-intelligence.com/
