Tag: shipping-surcharges

For the past two years, most container ships crossing between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe have taken the long way around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, avoiding the Red Sea after repeated attacks on merchant vessels near the Bab el-Mandeb strait. This week, that’s changing. According to freight industry reporting, Maersk and the Hapag-Lloyd-led Gemini alliance, along with CMA CGM and Cosco, are all pressing ahead with a return to Suez Canal routings — even though the security picture hasn’t actually improved. The US-Iran ceasefire expired without a resolution, and Houthi attacks on merchant shipping have reportedly resumed.

So why go back now? Economics. The Cape of Good Hope detour adds roughly two weeks to a typical Asia-Europe voyage, and with fuel costs climbing and canal draft restrictions squeezing capacity elsewhere, carriers are betting that a shorter route is worth the risk — as long as they can charge for it.

The surcharges are already scheduled

That’s the part shoppers and small importers should pay attention to. Reports on the carriers’ filings show emergency bunker surcharges of roughly $90 per container (FEU) and canal transit surcharges ranging from $200 to $1,000 per FEU are set to land in mid-September. War-risk insurance premiums tied to the Bab el-Mandeb crossing also remain elevated, and carriers are expected to pass those costs through as well. Layer that on top of a diesel price that jumped nearly 20 cents a gallon in a single week and new Panama Canal surcharges stacked on tightening draft limits, and the overall freight cost picture is getting more expensive from multiple directions at once — not because of one shock, but because several are landing at the same time.

Why this matters if you’re not shipping containers

You’re probably not booking ocean freight yourself, but these costs don’t stay contained to the shipping lines. Carrier surcharges filter down through the supply chain: retailers absorb some of it, but a meaningful share eventually shows up in shipping quotes, handling fees, and delivery timelines for everyone downstream, including cross-border forwarders and last-mile carriers. If you’re a shopper in the Gulf, Mexico, or elsewhere who regularly orders from US stores, or a small reseller who ships multiple packages a month, the practical effect is the same pattern shippers have dealt with all year: costs edging up, and timelines getting less predictable, in stages rather than all at once.

The mid-September surcharge date is worth circling. If you’ve got orders queued up, or you’ve been putting off shipping a backlog of purchases, doing it before mid-September means locking in current rates rather than whatever gets tacked on afterward.

Consolidation is still the best lever you have

None of this is really within a shopper’s control — you’re not choosing which canal a container ship takes. What you can control is how efficiently you ship. This is exactly the kind of environment where consolidating multiple purchases into fewer, larger shipments pays off, since fixed per-shipment costs and surcharges get spread across more items instead of being paid again and again on separate boxes. That’s the core of what a US-based forwarding address is useful for: services like Viabox let you buy from several US retailers, hold the packages at a US warehouse, combine them into one shipment, and forward the whole thing at once — which cushions exactly the kind of per-shipment surcharge stacking that’s about to get more common.

What to actually do about it

A few practical steps make sense given what’s coming:

• If you have pending US purchases, consider shipping them before mid-September rather than after, when new surcharges are expected to take effect.
• Consolidate wherever possible — combining orders into one outbound shipment reduces your exposure to per-shipment fee increases.
• Expect delivery estimates to shift more than usual over the next month as carriers adjust routings and pricing, and build a little extra buffer into time-sensitive orders.

None of this means cross-border shopping is getting impractical — global freight costs go through cycles like this regularly. But this particular squeeze has a specific date attached to it, which makes it one of the easier ones to plan around.