Booking Confirmation Tracker

Hours to two days in normal markets — automated systems confirm standard requests fast, with equipment or special-cargo checks adding a day. Beyond 48 hours, something specific is wrong: no equipment at your inland point, the sailing is effectively full at your rate level, or the request is sitting in a forwarder's queue. The chase isn't rude; it's how allocation works.

No — confirmation is the carrier's plan, subject to roll (overbooking, capacity cuts, cut-off misses). It's still the milestone that matters most: confirmed-then-rolled has remedies and data (see the rollover tracker); never-confirmed has neither. Treat confirmation as 'probable space' and the cut-offs as your half of making it real.

Two to three weeks before ETD in normal markets; four-plus in peaks and around blank-sailing clusters. Earlier requests get better equipment commitments and sit higher in the allocation queue. The board's requested-date field builds your own lead-time evidence: if your late requests correlate with your rolls, the fix is in the mirror, not the carrier.

Direct bookings give you the carrier's confirmation and allocation status first-hand; forwarder bookings ride the forwarder's allocations (sometimes better than yours, sometimes a queue behind their bigger clients). Either way this board tracks the same thing: how long YOUR requests take to become confirmed space, which is the only version of the market that matters to you.