2026-09-08

Why ships still wait at anchor, and why the fix is a data problem

Appeldoorn (the Netherlands), 8 September 2026 – On any given day, hundreds of fully loaded vessels sit at anchor offshore. They pushed hard to arrive on time. Now they wait, sometimes for days, while costs keep mounting. The industry calls it “sail fast, then wait”. The IMO estimates that ships spend up to 9% of their time waiting at anchorage. This is not only a container shipping problem. It happens across ship types, trade routes and port sizes.

tidalis, favicon

Tidalis Marketing Team
Marketing & Communications

The Tidalis Marketing Team shares news, event updates and insights from across our global organization.

Back to overview

The cost of waiting

Every day at anchor costs money. Drewry put average daily vessel operating costs at $7,474 in 2022, across 47 ship types and sizes, and that figure excludes fuel. In tight markets, the cost of a ship’s time climbs much higher. In June 2024, Maersk agreed to charter a 7,000 TEU newbuild for a record $150,000 per day.

Waiting is also common:

  • Schedule reliability: global container schedule reliability hovered between 50% and 55% throughout 2024. It recovered only to an average of 61.5% in 2025.
  • Singapore: in May 2024, container ships waited up to seven days for a berth.
  • Northern Europe: in summer 2025, congestion pushed peak waiting times to six to ten days at Rotterdam, and some operators reported delays of up to six days in Hamburg.

Just-in-time arrival

The solution is Just-in-Time (JIT) arrival. A vessel adjusts its speed to reach the pilot boarding place when the berth, fairway and nautical services are available.

A study commissioned by the IMO-Norway GreenVoyage2050 project analyzed 339,390 container ship voyages from 2019. It found that optimizing speed over the entire voyage could cut fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by an average of 14.16% per voyage. Fleet-wide, that adds up to CO2 reductions of up to 19.4 million metric tons per year.

The standards already exist. The Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) has published free, open-source JIT port call standards and API definitions. Its members include MSC, Maersk, CMA CGM and six other major carriers.

The data problem underneath

What standards cannot fix is the data problem underneath them. JIT requires a working information chain across shipowners, port authorities and terminal operators:

  • Shipowners need accurate berth availability to make speed decisions.
  • Ports need accurate arrival times to plan traffic sequencing.
  • Terminal operators need both to prepare berths efficiently.

Today, that chain is weak. One academic study found vessel-reported ETAs were off by an average of nearly seven hours. Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports that more than a third of AIS messages contain no ETA at all.
So if it is all about sharing data, what is the problem? The data to do better exists, but fierce competition and conflicting interests often keep stakeholders from sharing it.

Where MSG fits

This is where Made Smart Group (MSG), an independently operating Tidalis subsidiary, adds value. MSG maintains the world’s largest AIS data store, with vessel movement data collected since 2005. It combines that archive with weather, tidal and oceanographic data. Together, they support the kind of predictive arrival intelligence that turns reactive port operations into coordinated ones.

Getting the right data to the right stakeholder at the right time remains harder than it should be. That does not mean there is no solution. But until the chain works end to end, ships will keep waiting at anchor. Contact us to discuss how better arrival data can support your port.