Every unit of space you sell is sold to somebody, and not everybody wants the same thing. The Shipping Tycoon splits the customers on a lane into five kinds of shipper who look at the same rate, the same ship and the same line and reach entirely different conclusions about whether to book with you.
That split is why there is no single right rate. A rate that fills a ship on one port pair leaves it half empty on another, and the difference is not the distance — it is who does business at either end.
Space on a ship is sold in three classes, and they take different amounts of it:
Nothing on a ship gets a better journey for paying more. A reefer box buys a plug, a watchman and a place on deck where the crew can reach it; that is all. Premium at sea is scarcity, never service, and the page you are reading never pretends otherwise.
Before the list, one thing worth saying plainly: these are shippers, not passengers. Nobody aboard is having an experience. A customer here is a company with cargo and a date, and every one of them is more price-sensitive than any airline passenger ever was, because a container is a container. Even the most time-critical client in this game has a price elasticity where an airline's first-class passenger had almost none.
Spot shippers care about one thing. They compare your rate against what the lane ought to cost and walk away from an increase nobody else would notice. They book one cargo at a time, they never ask whether you sail again next week, and they have never heard of your line — nor does it bother them. If your strategy is volume at a low rate, these are your customers, and they are loyal to exactly nothing.
Contract shippers buy a slot on your weekly loop — same day, same berth, all year — and they are the closest thing to a foundation this business has.
Frequency matters to them more than any single thing matters to anybody else in the game. A liner service is not really a series of voyages; it is a promise that there will be a ship on Thursday, and if one sailing is missed a factory somewhere stops. That is the entire reason liner conferences and alliances exist in the real industry, and it is why a contract shipper will stay with a competent carrier for years at a rate barely above reference.
They notice a shabby hull not at all. Nobody has ever turned down a booking because the ship was built in 2004.
Retail importers are moving goods against a shelf date. What they are buying is not comfort — there is no cabin to improve — but reliability: cargo that arrives intact, on the day it was promised, with paperwork that clears. They pay a little over reference for it and they will drop you for a carrier they have never heard of if yours does not deliver it.
Of everybody on this list they are the most sensitive to whether they have heard of you, for the simple reason that they have the most choice. Thirty carriers can move a pallet of furniture.
Long-standing accounts choose a carrier before they choose a sailing. Reputation is the single biggest thing in their decision, and awareness comes close behind. They are the hardest group to win and the most valuable to keep, because they are the only ones still there after a competitor undercuts you.
Time-critical shippers are pharmaceuticals, perishables and fashion against a season. They judge reliability harder than anyone and they need reefer or project capacity that actually exists before they will look at you at all. They are the only customers who notice an ageing hull, and for a concrete reason rather than a fussy one: a twenty-year-old reefer plant is a genuine risk to a container of vaccine.
Here is the asymmetry worth learning. Because so few carriers can handle what they ship, they are less put off by an unknown line than the retail importer is. The narrower the requirement, the less it matters who you are. They are a small share of most lanes and a large share of the revenue on the ones where they are present, and reefer capacity sailed where they are not is the most expensive empty space in the game.
The mix in August is not the mix in February, and the shape of the year here has nothing in common with an airline's.
A carrier's high season is August to October. Everything destined for a Western shop shelf at Christmas has to be on a ship by then, because the voyage itself takes a month and the shelf date does not move. Rates climb, everybody wants space, and the spot market swells — in a peak month the spot shippers can be a third of the lane.
The floor is February, and it has one cause: Chinese New Year. The factories close for two weeks and a large share of the world's container flow simply stops. In that month the contract shippers are most of what is left, and the lane runs because they are on it. It is the clearest illustration of what contracts are actually for.
None of this changes how much cargo exists — that is the survey's business. It changes who the cargo belongs to, and therefore what rate the lane will bear that month.
The five groups are not secret; the page you are reading describes them. What is secret is the mix — what share each group holds on a specific port pair. That is what a survey sells you.
The mix shifts with the lane. Two industrial gateways with heavy trade carry time-critical shippers and long-standing accounts in numbers a short island run never does; the island run carries spot shippers who would not have shipped at all at a higher rate. A short crossing between neighbouring coasts is full of contract shippers. None of this is derivable from the map, the port sizes or anything else visible in the game, and it is deliberately not published here.
The reason is simple: the survey is the best mechanic in the game and it is worthless the moment demand can be worked out on paper. So the wiki tells you that spot shippers react harder to an increase than long-standing accounts do. It will never tell you how much harder, or what share of Rotterdam–Gothenburg they represent.
A line nobody has heard of is not the same as a line with a bad reputation. The first is invisible; the second is known and avoided. The game tracks both, and awareness is per lane, not per company.
You build awareness on a lane by sailing it. Sail it regularly and shippers at both ends learn that the service exists and that you operate it; stop sailing and the knowledge decays. A brand new lane on a brand new line starts from nearly nothing.
Awareness does not touch everybody. Spot shippers and contract shippers do not care whose funnel is on the ship — the cheapest space at the right time is the whole decision. Retail importers care somewhat. Long-standing accounts care enormously: an unknown carrier loses them almost entirely, because loyalty to a line you have never heard of is a contradiction.
This asymmetry is the shortcut a low-cost carrier gets. If you compete purely on rate, you can grow without ever building a brand, because your customers were never going to choose you for your name. The price of the shortcut is that you are permanently locked out of the customers who pay the most.
See also The economy, Trade lanes and operations and Reading your numbers.
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