Losing steam?

More ships arrived at their destination ports behind schedule last year, according to the latest Container Shipper Insight report issued in April from Drewry Shipping Consultants. According to Drewry, of the nearly 1,600 ships tracked in the last three months of 2009, only 53 percent arrived either on the scheduled day of arrival or a day prior. That was down 7 percentage points from the reliability rate in the first three quarters of 2009 and fell below the historic average, which now stands at 55 percent. Drewry added that the increase in unreliability coincides with an increase in the practice of slow steaming. “These results are especially disappointing as we had expected reliability to improve as a consequence of more slow-steaming, which should in theory help matters by creating a buffer in the schedule,” said Simon Heaney, editor of Freight Shipper Insight and Schedule Reliability Insight. “It seems that carriers are not prepared to put their foot down if they fall behind schedule,” he said.