Peak season is early this year: book space by late August

Peak season has arrived early this year. Booking volumes on our transatlantic and Asia lanes are running ahead of the same point last year, carriers have begun applying peak surcharges sooner than usual, and the first blank sailings of the autumn programme have already been announced. If your fourth quarter depends on stock landing in October and November, the practical deadline for locking in space is late August rather than the end of September.

None of this is a crisis, and we are not in the business of manufacturing urgency to fill a vessel. It is simply the annual arithmetic: when demand arrives two or three weeks earlier than the schedule was planned around, the shipments that get rolled are the ones booked last.

What we are seeing on the water

Three things tend to happen together at the start of a compressed peak, and all three are already visible. Allocation tightens first, as importers who were caught out last year book earlier this year. Surcharges follow, because carriers price scarcity. Then reliability drops, as vessels sail full, transhipment hubs congest and the buffer that absorbs a day of bad weather disappears.

The consequence for shippers is not usually a lack of space in absolute terms. It is that the remaining space is expensive, on a slower routing, or on a sailing that arrives after the date you needed. A container that is rolled twice in a congested period can lose two to three weeks against its original plan.

What to do in the next fortnight

• Confirm your October and November volumes with us now, even approximately. An indicative booking holds allocation and can be adjusted later; an enquiry holds nothing.
• Split critical stock across two sailings rather than one. A single rolled container is a stock-out. Two half containers on consecutive sailings almost never both roll.
• Bring forward anything that can be brought forward. Non-seasonal replenishment shipped in September costs less and travels more reliably than the same box in October.
• Decide now what your fallback is. Agreeing in advance that a specific line moves to air or rail if a vessel is missed is far cheaper than deciding it under pressure.
• Get documentation ready early. In a congested period, a shipment held for a missing certificate does not simply wait a day; it waits for the next available space.

Where rail and air fit

Rail on the Asia to Europe corridor comes into its own during a compressed peak, because it is the only option that meaningfully shortens transit without air freight economics. For seasonal ranges with a short selling window, moving the first tranche by rail and the bulk by ocean gets the range on sale on time while keeping the average freight cost close to the ocean number.

Air is the fallback rather than the plan. Where it does make sense is for the small proportion of stock that determines whether a whole range can be sold: the size or colour breaks, the promotional item in the advertising, the component without which a finished product cannot ship. We will price a part-air split alongside your ocean booking so the option is costed before you need it.

Warehousing and the arrival bottleneck

The second half of peak season is often more painful than the first, because everybody’s stock lands at once and destination warehouses run out of space. If you are likely to need overflow storage in November, contract it in August. Overflow arranged in advance is a rate; overflow arranged during a peak is whatever is left.

Bonded storage is worth considering at the same time, since it lets you defer duty until goods actually sell rather than funding it on arrival at the busiest point of your cash cycle.

What we are doing

We buy allocation on annual contracts rather than chasing the spot market week by week, which is why our protected slots hold when rates spike. For peak we hold additional space on our core lanes, we run a second weekly consolidation on the Rotterdam lane, and the control tower flags any booking at risk of a roll before the carrier confirms it, so you find out from us rather than from a tracking page.

If you want a peak plan rather than a rate, send us your expected volumes by lane and month and we will come back with protected allocation, a fallback routing for each critical line and a written cut-off calendar. There is no charge for the plan and no commitment attached to it. Email info@transatlantic-expres.com or call the freight desk on +1 507 201 9651, answered twenty-four hours a day.