Golden Week capacity hits record as typhoon bunching kills blanking

Deployed capacity on the transpacific and Asia-Europe trades during this year's Golden Week was the highest on record, according to Sea-Intelligence, despite carriers' attempts to blank sailings and prop up freight rates.

The Asia-US west coast trade alone saw 393,000 teu of weekly capacity deployed during the holiday window, against a normal Golden Week level of less than 300,000 teu. Port congestion in Asia, driven by a succession of typhoons, bunched vessels at loading ports and produced a run of what the consultancy calls "double sailings" — effectively cancelling out the blanking strategy carriers usually deploy when cargo dries up on Asia's docks over the holiday.

So what is a double sailing? "Double sailings are essentially two departures on a liner service in a week," Sea-Intelligence analysts said. "Liner services work on weekly departure frequencies – ie, one vessel departs the origin region every week. When vessels get delayed, they bunch up – the delayed departure that moved from week 1 to week 2 is now sailing along with the original week 2 departure, hence a 'double sailing'."

What do the numbers show?

Sea-Intelligence defined the Golden Week period as weeks 40 to 42, allowing for the lag in inland transport work that couldn't happen while China's drivers were on holiday. The comparison with history is stark. Between 2012 and 2019, carriers cut Golden Week capacity by an average of 8% on Asia-US west coast, 6% on Asia-US east coast, 16% on Asia-North Europe and 21% on Asia-Mediterranean, relative to surrounding weeks.

This year ran the other way:

• Asia-Mediterranean capacity up 18% versus the rest of Q3
• Asia-US east coast up 15%
• Asia-US west coast and Asia-North Europe both up 4%

That could read as carriers abandoning seasonal capacity management altogether. Sea-Intelligence doesn't buy it. Instead, it blames the volume of double sailings this month and scheduled for November, which have reached historically high levels on all four major trades.

"This massive influx of double sailings is a direct symptom of severe vessel bunching caused by ongoing port congestion and schedule unreliability in Asia," the consultancy said. "Vessels that were originally scheduled to depart during Q3 were heavily delayed and subsequently cascaded into the October and November loading windows."

The mechanics matter for anyone reading blank-sailing percentages. Delayed departures inflate the baseline of active sailings for the week, which artificially lifts deployed capacity and mathematically suppresses the blanked-capacity figure. In Sea-Intelligence's words, shipping lines "have not necessarily abandoned their capacity management strategies for Golden Week in 2026; rather, their networks are simply too heavily congested with bunched vessels to execute those strategies effectively".

What does it mean for shippers?

The underlying problem for cargo interests is the same poor schedule reliability that has dogged the trades all year. UK forwarder Metro Shipping said the distortion makes planning harder even when headline capacity looks adequate.

"Following China's Golden Week, around 95% of scheduled container sailings were expected to operate, suggesting relatively modest capacity withdrawals," Metro said. "However, conditions vary considerably between Asia-Europe and transpacific trades. Carrier schedule adjustments, congestion and disrupted vessel rotations continue to affect reliability, even where overall capacity appears sufficient."

For shippers and forwarders, the message is that capacity statistics right now overstate the dependability of the network. A near-full sailing schedule built on bunched, late vessels delivers no more certainty than a programme of deliberate blanks — and with more double sailings queued for November, congestion-driven capacity inflation on the east-west trades looks set to persist into the fourth quarter.