Drewry’s Red Sea Diversion Tracker provides timely intelligence to shippers, carriers, ports and other stakeholders about the evolving architecture of carrier networks in the region. This tracking page will be updated every two weeks (every Tuesday).
Red Sea Diversion Tracker – Evaluation as of 05 May 2026
The number of container ships sailing through the Suez Canal has recovered in the past two weeks, returning to pre-Iran conflict levels, according to the Drewry Red Sea Diversion Tracker.
In the two-week period ending May 3, 56 container ships transited through Suez (27 in week 17 and 29 in week 18). The two-week total was up 33% from the 42 crossings in the previous two-week period ending April 17.
Much of the increase is due to CMA CGM, which increased the number of 8,000 TEU ships transiting the Suez Canal to 10 in the last two-week period, compared to 2 in the previous two-week period. CMA CGM now operates 4 services via Suez using larger vessels: OCR (Japan and Northern Europe), EPIC (South Asia and Northern Europe), MEX (Asia and Mediterranean), and IMEX (South Asia and Mediterranean), and is said to charge premium rates for faster transits.
In the last two weeks, CMA CGM and MSC were again the only carriers to send ships of more than 8,000 TEU through the Suez Canal, Drewry AIS tracking shows.
Meanwhile, the number of ships sailing around the Cape of Good Hope rose by 6% to 353 in the two-week period ending 3 May, compared to 333 in the two-week period ending 17 April. Cape Town remains the dominant route linking Asia and Europe, and a wholesale return to the Suez route seems a long way off.
Drewry provides up-to-date forecasts of container traffic demand, fuel prices and freight rates in the Drewry Container Forecaster for March 2026, including logical scenarios to consider when planning.
Drewry tracks 5 indicators that enable stakeholders to monitor progress on the return to the Suez Canal in its container capacity vision: “best-case” transit times between Asia and Europe, port congestion (ship waiting times), schedule reliability, and carrier capacity.
Source: Drury
