Global shipping schedule reliability improved for the second consecutive month, reaching its highest level since November 2023, according to a new Sea-Intelligence report.

The Danish shipping data analysis firm said global schedule reliability rose 3.0 percentage points month-over-month in March 2025, hitting 57.5%. Year-over-year, the March figure also went up 3.0 percentage points.

Xeneta reported that Maersk was the most reliable of the top 13 carriers in March, with a schedule reliability of 66.9%, followed by Hapag-Lloyd at 64.3% and MSC at 61.9%.

In March, new shipping alliance services recorded their first vessel arrivals on a trade lane basis. In February, arrivals had only occurred in the origin regions of the East/West trades.

Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, explained that alliance reliability is measured by arrivals in destination regions under the standard methodology. Since this metric was unavailable for the new alliances in February, Sea-Intelligence introduced an additional measure that accounts for all arrivals, including calls in origin regions.

Xeneta reported two metrics: "All arrivals," which includes both origin and destination calls and aligns with February's methodology, and "Trade arrivals," which tracks only destination calls in line with previous alliance evaluations.

Once the new alliances are fully implemented, the two measures will converge.

In February/March 2025, Gemini recorded a schedule reliability of 90.3% across all arrivals and 85.7% for trade arrivals, followed by MSC at 75.8% for all arrivals and 74.4% for trade arrivals.

Premier Alliance posted a reliability of 53.2% across all arrivals and 51.2% for trade arrivals.

For legacy alliances, trade and all arrivals were equivalent. Ocean Alliance reported 54.9% reliability, while the outgoing 2M and THE alliances recorded 43.1% and 46.5%, respectively.

"The new alliances will not be fully rolled out until July 2025," Murphy said. "Only then will it be possible to properly evaluate their performance."