Blank sailing

A blank sailing is a scheduled voyage a shipping line cancels, or a port it skips, usually to cut capacity when demand is weak or to keep a delayed schedule on track. Booked containers move to the next sailing. Drewry expected 34 of 713 East–West sailings, 5%, to be blanked between mid-October and mid-November 2026.

What it means

UNCTAD defines a blank sailing as no sailing or a cancelled sailing: a vessel does not call at one or more of its scheduled stops, skipping a single port, or the whole voyage is cancelled. Lines do it mainly because of a lack of demand or to maintain schedule integrity — and around holidays: Maersk blanked transpacific sailings for Chinese New Year 2026 because reduced exports required limited blank sailings to align capacity.

How many sailings are blanked

Drewry's Cancelled Sailings Tracker, 9 October 2026: across the major East–West trades, 34 blank sailings expected from week 42 to week 46 out of 713 planned, a 5% cancellation rate. Asia–North Europe and the Mediterranean account for 50% of the cancellations, the transpacific eastbound for 32% and the transatlantic for 18%.

Worked example: a weekly loop

Who pays for the extra days

It depends on the carrier's tariff. Hapag-Lloyd's US rules say time lost when a vessel is cancelled or delayed does not count toward free time, detention or demurrage, and the carrier absorbs those charges from the originally scheduled sailing until the incident ends. Elsewhere, read the carrier's tariff before assuming the same.

The mistake people make

Planning on the published schedule alone. Sea-Intelligence noted in April 2025 that many blank sailings were announced with very limited advance warning to shippers; build a week of slack into anything that must arrive on a given date, and watch the carrier's advisories.