Most management games tell you what you earned. The Shipping Tycoon also tells you what your customers thought, which is the number that predicts what you will earn next month. The statistics page is where a shipping line stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a business with customers.
Everything on it comes from the voyages themselves. Every sailing records whose cargo was on board, how satisfied each kind of customer was and — when they were not satisfied — what the main reason was.
The first thing you see is how each of the five customer groups rated shipping with you. The groups are described in What you carry; what matters here is that they rate you on different things, so a spread of scores is normal and informative.
Spot shippers scoring well while retail importers score badly is not a failure — it is a description of the line you are running. It becomes a problem only if you are also trying to sell reefer and project capacity.
Watch the gap rather than the average. A company where every group sits in the middle is one that has not committed to anything, and it will be beaten on rate by a discount carrier and on product by a quality one.
The same customers, sorted by what they shipped. This is the fastest way to spot capacity that does not belong on a lane: a project hold with high satisfaction and almost no bookings is capacity that is nice and empty, and empty specialised space is the most expensive space you can sail.
Low satisfaction in dry cargo with high fill is the opposite problem — you are filling the ship by underselling the service, which works until somebody else does it better.
Complaints are ranked by how many customers they came from, and each one is the worst thing about the voyage for that customer, not a list of everything they disliked. That is why the list is short and why it moves when you fix something: solve the biggest complaint and the second biggest becomes the headline.
The reasons are the things you can actually change — the rate against what the lane expects, the level of service, your reputation, how often you sail the lane, the age of the ship, and whether anybody had heard of you.
Praise works the same way in reverse. A group that scored well gets to say why, and the share tells you how much of your business agreed.
The useful habit is to read the complaints as a to-do list ordered by revenue rather than by severity. A complaint from a group that is two percent of your bookings is worth less attention than a milder one from the group that is half of them.
Three breakdowns: by group, by class and by destination. The group chart is the one worth studying, because it is the only place you see the realised mix — not what the survey said the market looked like, but who actually chose you.
The difference between those two is your competitive position. If a lane surveys as heavy in premium cargo and your ship comes back full of spot shippers' boxes, the time-critical shippers went somewhere else, and knowing that is worth more than the survey was.
The header says how many of your sailings had a survey behind them. Voyages on unsurveyed lanes still sail and still earn, but they cannot report a customer mix, because the mix is exactly what the survey buys.
If that number is low relative to your fleet, the statistics page is describing a small and possibly unrepresentative slice of your company.
See also What you carry and The economy.
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