Many ocean carrier estimated time of arrival (ETA) estimates are not only inaccurate but frequently missing, according to an analysis of more than 500,000 shipments a year conducted by Tradlinx, a supply chain data platform based in South Korea.
The report found that carriers left the ETA blank in 42,832 cases, or 8.43% of shipments, most often while cargo was waiting at a transshipment port. In fact, nearly three in four gaps occur at the transshipment port. The ETA for the intermediate transshipment port was missing in 30,929 cases (6.09%), the final-destination ETA of transshipment cargo in 6,168 cases (1.21%), and the destination ETA of direct shipments in 5,735 cases (1.13%). Transshipment cargo accounts for 87% of all gaps.
The amount of delay by which carrier ETAs missed actual arrival was 15.4 hours on average (mean absolute error) across the validation sample. And 5% of shipments saw carrier ETAs miss by 48 hours or more. In this group of 25,341 shipments (4.99%), the average carrier ETA error was 90.0 hours.
“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,” Tradlinx said. “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.”
