Ocean carriers left the estimated time of arrival field completely blank in 42,832 shipments — 8.43% of the total — according to an analysis of more than 500,000 shipments a year run by Tradlinx, a supply chain data platform based in South Korea. That works out to roughly one in twelve ocean shipments moving without a carrier ETA at some point in the journey.

The problem is not evenly distributed. Nearly three in four of the missing-ETA cases occur at transshipment ports, the chokepoints where planners need visibility most. Tradlinx found:

• Transshipment port ETA missing in 30,929 cases (6.09% of shipments)
• Final-destination ETA of transshipment cargo missing in 6,168 cases (1.21%)
• Destination ETA of direct shipments missing in 5,735 cases (1.13%)

Transshipment cargo accounts for 87% of all ETA gaps, meaning shippers routing through hubs such as Singapore, Busan or Rotterdam face the weakest visibility precisely where handoffs multiply the risk of delay.

How far off are the ETAs that do exist?

For shipments where carriers did publish an ETA, accuracy was still shaky. Across the validation sample, carrier ETAs missed actual arrival by 15.4 hours on average (mean absolute error). Five percent of shipments — 25,341 in total, or 4.99% — saw carrier ETAs miss by 48 hours or more. Within that outlier group, the average error stretched to 90.0 hours, close to four full days.

For cargo planners, a 15-hour average miss is the difference between a trucker waiting at the terminal and a demurrage clock starting to run. A 90-hour miss in the tail of the distribution can invalidate an entire drayage and warehouse slotting plan.

What does the gap mean for shippers and forwarders?

Tradlinx argued the industry is asking the wrong question. "Most of the industry conversation is about how accurate carrier ETAs are. Our data points to a more basic gap: for roughly one in twelve shipments, the ETA simply goes missing somewhere along the way," the company said.

The operational consequences compound quietly. "Those blanks cluster at transshipment ports, where planners need visibility most. An empty field rarely triggers an alert, so teams end up checking carrier portals by hand, customer updates slow down, and trucking and warehouse plans are made without a reliable arrival time," Tradlinx said.

For freight forwarders selling visibility as part of their service, the data points to a structural weak spot: carrier feeds alone cannot guarantee a complete arrival picture, particularly on transshipment routings that dominate Asia–Europe and intra-Asia trades. Shippers with high container throughput through hub ports may need to treat blank ETAs as an exception class of their own — one that requires automated detection rather than manual portal checks.

The findings also raise the bar for carrier digitalization programs. Publishing an ETA is table stakes; publishing it consistently at every leg of a transshipment move, with an accuracy tighter than 15 hours, is where the industry's visibility promises will actually be tested.