The boat is rarely what loses the week. The chain of deadlines behind the boat is, and almost nobody works it out in the right order.
Customers plan a shipment forwards, from the supplier to the island, and then lose a week at the end. The only way to plan sea freight is backwards, from the sailing day.
Start with the day the boat leaves for your island. Say it is Wednesday.
Cargo has to be in our shed by four on Tuesday afternoon. That is not a formality. A manifest is built on Tuesday evening and the hold is stowed on Tuesday night, because a boat sailing on Wednesday morning cannot be loaded on Wednesday morning.
So the cargo has to leave your supplier on Tuesday morning at the latest, which means the supplier has to have it complete on Monday. If any part of it is coming from a clearing agent, the clearance has to be finished on Monday, which means the declaration went in on Friday, which means the papers were complete on Thursday of the week before.
Now count the links. Wednesday sailing, Tuesday four o clock, Tuesday morning collection, Monday complete at the supplier, Friday clearance, Thursday papers. Six deadlines, and missing any one of them does not cost you a day. It costs you until the next Wednesday.
That is the whole thing people get wrong. On a weekly route, a delay is never a delay of hours. It is a delay of a week, and the customer who was one hour late to the shed and the customer who was four days late pay exactly the same price.
Two practical habits fix most of it.
The first is to order so that the supplier is complete a week before the sailing you want, not the day before. A week of slack costs nothing, and it means one late supplier does not push you into the next sailing.
The second is to send the whole load at once. Three part loads are three collections, three measurements and three chances that one late item holds up the rest. If you are buying from six wholesalers, tell us and we will collect from all six; we do that every week for shop groups and it is the single cheapest improvement available to an island buyer.
And if a date genuinely cannot move, say so at booking. There is usually something we can do, up to and including putting your cargo on another operator's sailing on a different day, but only while there is still time to do it.
