Five things in the schedule data this week

I read sailing schedules the way some people read the weather page: not for the headline, but for what changed since yesterday. A schedule is a promise carriers make to themselves, and the edits to it are where the promises get quietly revised. This week I diffed four weeks of published Asia to Europe and transpacific schedules. Five things came out of it.

1. Tuesday is the day schedules get edited. Of 212 revisions I logged across 38 services, 71 landed on a Tuesday between 14:00 and 18:00 Singapore time. Carriers do not announce this. It is simply when the network planners finish their weekly meeting and someone has to update the file. If you pull your data on Monday, you are always a week behind the people who pull it on Wednesday.

2. Three services lost a port call and kept their name. The Asia to Mediterranean loop that used to call Piraeus, Genoa and Valencia now calls Piraeus and Valencia. The service code is unchanged, the rotation count is unchanged, and the transit time to Genoa on the website is still 31 days. Nobody has updated the web page. The schedule feed, however, shows the omission three weeks out, which is where you should be looking.

Here is the part that matters for anyone with cargo booked into Genoa, and it is a short walk from the schedule file to a surcharge.