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Expectations of the Shipping Market for 2022

Friday, 28th January 2022

We are wishing all our customers a very Happy New Year, and we hope you all have a fantastic year ahead. If you are moving homes this year, we hope to play a small part in helping get your new year off to a fantastic start by making moving homes a positive experience.

We want to take some time to make our customers aware of some potential issues we are facing as a moving company trying to ship internationally with container shipping lines when helping our customers move abroad. 

The British Association of Removers (BAR) have predicted one of the main issues of 2022 is going to be the rates across the year. The association have released a more in depth analysis of the issues surrounding rates, but what customers moving abroad generally need to know is rates are continuing to change and the coming year’s negotiations will be particularly tough as different shipping lines will likely have different ideas as to where the rate levels sit. However, this BAR document has made it transparently clear to everyone where the actual market rate levels sit.

Another issue that has surfaced is shipping lines continuing to negotiate their rates up to the day the new contract begins. This makes it difficult for us to quote their accounts and customers as they may not know where the final rates are. All efforts will be made to get the new rates agreed as early as possible, but customers need to understand that if they make a booking through the transition period they will have to pay whatever the rate turns out to be.

Increases in freight rates have done nothing to address the dramatic decline in customer service and reliability offered by the shipping lines themselves either. Over the past 18 months the reasons for this decline in service have increased, whether it is excessive demand, congestion, equipment imbalances, infrastructure failures, haulage, rail, port capacity, or lack of staff, but the freight rates keep getting higher and the service levels continue to deteriorate.

The decline has been so intense that the BAR have noted an issue or failure with nearly every booking. Click here to see a full list of examples highlighted by the BAR which may now happen to a booking that might impact the customers experience with either a delay or additional cost. 

What is most important to note is, shockingly, all of the given reasons are actually outside the control of a moving company such as ourselves. What’s worse is that shipping lines will generally accept zero responsibility for any of these service failures or rate increases, nor accept culpability for these failures to customers.

As much as we are looking forward to 2022, we hope this explains to our customers how difficult it has become for us as a removal company to ship goods worldwide, but please know we are doing the best we can under the circumstances. Thank you.

• 2022 Shipping Expectations - BAR December 2021.pdf