2025 marked a modest but meaningful step forward for global schedule reliability – but it’s far from business as usual. Average on-time arrivals rose from 30% in 2024 to 34% with a 13% YoY increase. This may have eased us out of pandemic-level lows, but it hasn't left us with an abundance of optimism for the months ahead either.
Welcome to Xeneta’s Schedule Reliability Scorecard, a Year in Review. We kick off the new year with a macro look at global reliability in 2025. Each week we’ll be peeling back another layer in the story of schedule reliability and how geopolitical events large and small shape our connections to the global supply chain.
While the resting state of global reliability remained firmly below ideal these past 12 months, we did finally climb our way out of pandemic-level territory with a 13% improvement against the previous year. Arrivals in 2025 held relatively steady at an average of 34%, while 2024 closed with an average of 30% on-time. If we set aside the exceptionally poor Q1 results shaped by the final throes of 2M and THE alliances, the 2025 average rounds out a tick higher at 36%, and illustrates a more significant 20% increase in on-time arrivals against 2024.
Improvements against the previous year were echoed at the scale of month-over-month fluctuations and delays. In 2024 we saw monthly reliability fluctuate by as much as 18% of on-time arrivals cut from March (34%) through April (28%) and an average of 2.5 percentage points per month. The range was a ceiling of 34% and monthly dips as low as 26% in August. Average monthly delays throughout 2024 were -4.5 days and consistently exceeded –5.0 from August through December. (....)